Christine Robinson's Library tagged tagging →  View Popular, Search in Google

Should we be thinking about how to prepare our kids for a linked, tagged  world?

What strategies do we need to develop to read and write in linked, tagged  world?

How do we best harness the potential of a world where knowledge is easily  connected and, therefore, increasingly overwhelming and, as my  wife pointed out, perhaps paralyzing?

think folksonomies can work well for certain kinds of information because  they offer a small reward for using one of the popular categories (such as your  photo appearing on a popular page). People who enjoy the social aspects of the  system will gravitate to popular categories while still having the freedom to  keep their own lists of tags.

 

On the other hand, I can see a few reasons why a folksonomy would be less  than ideal in a lot of cases:

 
• None of the current implementations have synonym control (e.g. "selfportrait" and "me" are distinct Flickr tags, as  are "mac" and "macintosh" on Del.icio.us).  
• Also, there's a certain lack of precision involved in using simple one-word  tags--like which Lance are we  talking about? (Though this is great for discovery, e.g. hot or Edmonton)  
• And, of course, there's no heirarchy and the content types (bookmarks,  photos) are fairly simple.
 

Still, the idea of socially constructed classification schemes (with no input  from an information architect) is interesting. Maybe one of these services will  manage to build a social thesaurus.

Folksonomy is the result of personal free tagging of information and objects  (anything with a URL) for one's own retrieval. The tagging is done in a social  environment (usually shared and open to others). Folksonomy is created from the  act of tagging by the person consuming the information.

The value in this external tagging is derived from people using their own  vocabulary and adding explicit meaning, which may come from inferred  understanding of the information/object. People are not so much categorizing, as  providing a means to connect items (placing hooks) to provide their meaning in  their own understanding.