On the SXSW06 Tagging 2.0 panel Thomas Vander Wal just cited Bitzi as (more or less) a non-successful predecessor to Tagging 2.0 applications, saying something like “things like Bitzi (mumble) Cory Doctorow called metacrap.”

Vander Wal recently explained in a comment at Joho the Blog:

The big thing that was different, from say Bitzi, was people tagging information in their own vocabulary for their own reuse. Tagging information for others as a priority seems to make it far less accurate as a person may not understand the terms they are using (well understand them as other may).

He’s right. There’s too little private benefit to “tagging” at Bitzi, largely because what interfaces to what you have individually contributed are lame to the extent they exist. The Bitzi use case is rather different from del.icio.us and Flickr but it can learn a lot from them.