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Argues for the usefulness of collaborative tagging, and highlights the known problems with free tagging. Points to some obvious, and some more controversial ways of limiting problems of inter-tagger inconsistency and meaningless distinctions.
In this article we look at what makes folksonomies work. We agree with the premise that tags are no replacement for formal systems, but we see this as being the core quality that makes folksonomy tagging so useful. We begin by looking at the issue of "sloppy tags", a problem to which critics of folksonomies are keen to allude, and ask if there are ways the folksonomy community could offset such problems and create systems that are conducive to searching, sorting and classifying. We then go on to question this "tidying up" approach and its underlying assumptions, highlighting issues surrounding removal of low-quality, redundant or nonsense metadata, and the potential risks of tidying too neatly and thereby losing the very openness that has made folksonomies so popular.
Looks at the development of various classification systems leading up to tagging, or user created metadata. Argues that tagging more closely mirrors the nature of web information.
Argues that ontologies are a bad ideal for organizing the world online. Points out that library classification systems are designed to optimize space on the shelves, not to describe the essences of identities. Also, that library classification systems are fundamentally about organizing books, not about organizing the enormity of human knowledge. The same flaws exists in a hierarchical file system. That it is designed with the assumption that a thing can only be in one place at one time -- it makes some attempt to have the organizional structure of ideas match the physical world, where in fact a pointer, or an idea, or a metaphorical path can be in countless places at the same time, and can have many equally important and useful relationships which describe it.
That ontologies are useful where there are expert users, clear categories and a limited domain. But, much less useful for non-expert users or large domains, and fuzzy categories. Links are the universal pointers on the web, and the addition of tags is simple, and provides a much more useful finding system than an ontology. With a system like delicious, you get to know who's doing the tagging, not just what the tags are, so you get to limit searches by people and time, limiting the size of your group [penntags tie-in].
My favorite article. I wish I could force you to read this article. please...
"And you would never ever get this organization of knowledge right. Its not a solvable problem. It cant be done. Theres not a right way of doing it because there’s no single way of organizing this stuff. Taxonomies are not reflections of nature, they’re tools. And tools depend on what you want to do. It depends on your context. So along comes tagging."