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.

Wired article

from the infosthetics blog - "semantically ordered tag clouds that resemble self-organizing maps. the size of the text & the color brightness of the background represent the frequency of the different terms. this technique has been applied to visualize the keywords present in website favorites, or the tags used by different del.ico.us users for the same web pages."

 tags clouds developed by Moritz Stefaner

TagCloud is an automated Folksonomy tool. Essentially, TagCloud searches any number of RSS feeds you specify, extracts keywords from the content and lists them according to prevalence within the RSS feeds. Clicking on the tag's link will display a list of all the article abstracts associated with that keyword.

Here The Search Guy claims that inconsistency in assigning keywords is the problem with tagging, and I would say that that same inconsistency is the whole reason why tags are useful in some instances. Because if I'm looking for something that I've already found, I want to be able to search for it in the context that I remember it, and not in some arbitrary other context that someone else imagined. It's not a replacement for subject headings in most cases, but is another way of keeping information.

This is a new browser, based on the Firefox model, that incorporates tagging and feeds into its structure. I wonder how hard it will be to add extensions.

Useful article explaining how to use connotea and why you might want to.