After reviewing the comments/emails I've received so far, I realized my article could make the motivation clearer. As I've mentioned in this post/comments, I agree with everyone regarding basic tagging - it's by far the simplest way for any user to organize their media/text so that others can search/relate their content. I don't see this ever going away. However, I decided to take a step back in this article and look at the issues with the current tagging model and examine an alternative method, namely hierarchical multi-labeling. Hierarchical multi-labeling solves many of the issues concerning basic tagging and should lend to better auto-tagging algorithms since it tells us how tags are related to each other. I definitely agree this isn't something we should expect the average user to perform - but I do think power users and content aggregators like Google News could benefit greatly from this tagging model.
One of my goals this semester is to let anyone (most likely a hardcore geek) pass a tag network and training data (both represented as files) to my web service and I generate for them a classifier page (with a search box that takes in a webpage link or a string of words). Click 'Classify' and it'll return the best set of tags for that input based off the training data examples. Services can use this to classify their news articles, emails, bookmarks, etc. Notice the grunt work (which isn't too bad) is done by a geek, but all users can benefit from such a system.
Anyway, hope you enjoy the read and please comment if possible.