Of course the big search engines have tagging on their radar as well. Yahoo recently purchased Flickr. Furl, another bookmark sharing site, was absorbed by LookSmart. Ask Jeeves now has tagging. And Amazon invested in a site called 43 Things that lets people tag-based build wish lists. They might even be the silver bullet search engines need to deliver truly personalized search results. When this happens folksonomies and tagvertising will usher in the next great advancement in contextual advertising. Here are a few ways in which tagging will create new opportunities for marketers. Some are applicable today while others are on the horizon in the near future: Although tags are far from perfect (they generate a lot of false/positives), marketers should nevertheless be using them to keep your finger on the pulse of the American public. Start subscribing to RSS feeds to monitor how consumers are tagging information related to your product, service, company or space. These are living focus groups that are available for free, 24/7. Folksonomy sites can be also be carefully used to unleash viral marketing campaigns - with a caveat. Marketers should be transparent in who they are, why they are posting the link/photos and avoid spamming the services As tagging grows and the search engines begin adding this feature to their sites, Google and Overture will allow advertisers to buy keywords across certain tags. Watch for this later this year. Last but not least, one or more entrepreneurs will launch a tagvertising network that facilitates a keyword buy across all sites that use folksonomies