del.icio.us for people

Why does del.icio.us for people not exist yet? This would be a means of tagging people with words; annotating their interest areas, likes and dislikes, how you know them, where you met them and probably many other aspects of meta data.

People-tagging would ideally have full portability across the Internet including social networking applications (myspace, LinkedIn, plaxo, etc.), personal IM, email and blogs and corporate/other group applications. Like regular webtags, peopletags could be self-assigned and/or discovered and shared with tiered permissioning.

Instant Affinity Tag Communication - Next Gen RSS
Imagine being able to instantly transmit news, blogposts, videos, events, etc. to a variety of affinity groups without having to remember which friends and colleagues are interested in which topics, Markets 2.0, videoblogging, sustainable energy, etc.

Even more robust would be a next generation of RSS, auto-alerting any identity with a "Singularity" tag, for example, with immediate notice of any new content tagged with Singularity posted to the Internet. Instant Affinity Tag Communication would not only provide richer data streams but also allow anonymity and reduce the requirement of personal relationships to obtain information.

Is it ethical to tag people?
Why not? A tag cloud accompanying people would be a better implementation of currently self-specified interest areas. Like many technologies, some form of people-tagging seems inevitable and mostly productive. The legal frontier would grow to address the extension of libel and slander as hate-tagging, inaccurate tagging and other problematic tagging occurred. Early people-tagging implementations could allow only self-tagging.

A people tagging system could be imbued with trust and value through tag attribute granularity such as by having a parameter for self-tagged vs. tagged by close-circle or wide-world others, disputed/ambiguous/conflicting tags and the ability to filter based on tag attributes.