Free tagging lets users tag blog posts or other types of content freely based on their perspective or need, while the autocomplete feature lets users see what other's used before them as tags, allowing them to use the same or be more exacting.  Free tagging combined with autocomplete is an intelligent communiy website tool as it draws on the power of the community and furthers collaboration through collective categorization. People powered sorting!

A few weeks ago we enabled our blog with free tagging, which allows for us and guest bloggers to create taxonomy terms on the fly and automatically create RSS feeds for these terms.  The tags are recognizable by services like Technorati.  This week we made a few more changes and implemented free tagging with autocomplete powered by an AJAX module. 

Props to Drupal and the folks who worked on Ajax and autocomplete functionality, now part of core Drupal.We have free tagging and autocomplete running on our blog.  It is also working on MobileActive.org, a conference website about mobile phone technology and activism.  You can sign up for an account on MobileActive.org and while creating a blog entry you will see in the tagging field how terms previously used by site members are autocompleted according to the relevance of the letters you type as you enter your tags.  You can even separate your tags by comma and the autocomplete will reinitiate to recognize the second, third, or n word you type.