Interesting discussion on blog tagging

[trixtah]

...and the use of tags for bookmarking, over at Technorati. There's a huge uptake of tagging for blogs; nearly a third of blog posts that Technorati track are tagged already.

This is all fairly apposite after my burblings about del.icio.us below. The Technorati pullquote that summarises precisely what I couldn't put my finger on is this:

Unlike rigid taxonomy schemes that many people dislike using, the ease of tagging for personal organization with social incentives leads to a rich and discoverable system, often called a folksonomy. Intelligence is provided by real people from the bottom-up to aid social discovery. And with the right tag search and navigation, folksonomy may outperform more structured approches to classification [...]

They quote from Clay Shirky on "folksonomies" (can't say that's a coining I like at all, although I like the concept) versus controlled vocabularies for metadata. The quote they pull is interesting, but I also like these comments:

The advantage of folksonomies isn’t that they’re better than controlled vocabularies, it’s that they’re better than nothing, because controlled vocabularies are not extensible to the majority of cases where tagging is needed. Building, maintaining, and enforcing a controlled vocabulary is, relative to folksonomies, enormously expensive, both in the development time, and in the cost to the user, especailly the amateur user, in using the system. [...]

Any comparison of the advantages of folksonomies vs. other, more rigorous forms of categorization that doesn’t consider the cost to create, maintain, use and enforce the added rigor will miss the actual factors affecting the spread of folksonomies. Where the internet is concerned, betting against ease of use, conceptual simplicity, and maximal user participation, has always been a bad idea.

Power to the people, indeed.

Comments

[filkferengi]

The only tagging I know anything about is when the cat pounces from ambush [hopefully not with claws] to proclaim "Tag! you're it!"

But then, the last few months, I haven't posted anything substantive enough to tag anyway. I'm too busy gaping at your adventures. ;)

[next time, don't forget the marshmallows, the candles, & a roasting implement.]