Matt McAlister posted a thoughtful response to mine about Foucauldian/disciplinaty implications for tagging individuals (as opposed to objects like websites, though this could be extended to an individual in many cases). Unfortunately I haven't had time to re-respond unitl now.

Matt writes:

"There may be cases where building meaning from collections of tags will give institutions dependent on structuralism some kind of new insight that could be used for power or for classifying people into buckets or something. But those are just fears that should never be used to stop progress."

I agree that progress in distributed/populist taxonomies should not be stopped, but those making this progress should be aware of the larger implications (both positive and negative) of their work. Also, rather than a danger of hierarchical institutions taking advantage of folksonomic tagging of individuals, the danger lies in the emergent swarm acting as the surveilling (disciplinary) institution. What is essentially created in this imaginary del.icio.us for individuals is a distributed panopticon where everyone is classified as they have been tagged. When this situation arises, the centralized institutions will no longer be needed as disciplinary/surveillant entities. We, as the swarm, will be enacting a mass self-surveillance