Interestingness - Looking at how we use tags to describe ourselves and our audiences

I am in the middle of helping a new client build a set of words (tags) that will be used to drive our matching engine and help them match talent to tasks within their organization. In setting the tone for the challenge of picking the right words I am constantly looking for metaphors and analogies that will help them understand.

I was just reading the forward to Malcolm Gladwell's new book, What The Dog Saw, and he spoke of 'interestingness' - which reminded my of that term as it applies to images, and how Flickr has a search term: interestingness. This got me to thinking that maybe the best way to help my client understand that the best tags for their audience would be those that pass an 'interestingness' test.

In the networks that we build, we have a set of tags that are presented to each user during the profiling process. These words are considered by the user, then selected by them - each word being given a weight, or importance. The collection of selected words shown on the persons public profile and used by our matching engine to match them with others of similar interests, passions, values, experiences, skills, strengths and objectives. You might think of the tags as brand characteristics. And in this particular client's case, I am strongly suggesting that they should consider them exactly like this, as developing brand identity is something this client is very familiar with.

Which brings me back to interestingness.

When you complete an online profile, you typically are not thinking about this dimension - "What of this profile makes me more or less interesting?" Why would someone want to get to know me better as result of the tags I have selected?

If we believe that a population can be defined by the language they use (Kevin Kelly says that communication is the heart of our culture) and that language in today's' Everything 2.0 world can be distilled into a set of tags or keywords, then is it logical to conclude that you can come up with a set of tags that can be presented to an audience, and if the tags have been considered correctly, they in fact will resonate deeply with the audience and in fact describe them nearly perfectly.

Maybe.

My counsel to clients to date has been literal and encyclopedic. Give them words that make a lot of sense, that describe them in detail, that challenge them to think deeply about the choices they make, to think about how they are seen by others. Yet, today, with this notion of interestingness in play, I wonder if my counsel to them should be:

Are they interesting enough?