…Browsing is shopping, strolling, flipping through a magazine. Browsing is fun, casual, entertaining.

Searching is mechanical, trial and error, frustrating. Searching is work.

There’s a powerful emotional difference between the two.

…Here’s what’s neat about tags: They’re bottom-up, so the classification comes from the people who make the content, not some highfalutin academic. They’re flat, not hierarchical, so they avoid the pitfalls of hierarchical organization. And they’re emergent – a thousand monkeys with a thousand typewriters and all that.

But other people have already talked about all that, but what I find truly exciting about tags is that they’re all about browsing. And not the directory/library/annoyingly hidden kind of browsing that led to the death of the Yahoo Directory and the emergence of the single Google box – the fun kind of browsing, like shoe shopping on Haight Street.

At Technorati, we’re sitting on top of this amazing, living, gigantic database of information culled from what we call the real-time web (aka the blogosphere). Wanna know who posted the word “tagonomy” first? Wanna see who links to powazek.com and what they said? We can tell you. But you have to search. You have to type something into that intimidating box and click a button and hope for the best.

Searching is work, browsing is fun.

Tags are the first major interface to our living database that’s truly browsable.

Derek Powazek: “Searching vs. Browsing: 1/19/05