Taggers Take Heart

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		Taggers Take Heart Created by Joe Clark (Florida State University) on March 14, 2006 These days articles about tagging often repeat an image of Monk-like librarians freaking out about the rise of folksonomic classification. One imagines uniformed order-obsessed Gruppen-Kataloguers peering out of a fortress window and muttering about the rabble in the courtyard below. "Zey need our help," one chuckles, leeringly, fondling a weapon. As satisfyingly as that may reinforce the stereotypes of some commentators, I'm not sure how accurate it is. Witness a couple of recent blog entries that take an analytical look the tagging phenom and come up with good news: Academic Commons cites a D-Lib report suggesting folksonomies are more valuable and stable than many believe, and Blogger Clay Shirky writes a persuasive argument on the failure of ontology in a web-connected world, and why folksonomies might be a better solution to organizing information off the bookshelf. Both worth a close look. Blog (WebLog) \| Folksonomies \| Library Standards \| tagging Joe's blog Login or register to post comments 4253 reads If you look at the way Submitted by Stuart Yeates (University of Oxford) on March 14, 2006 - 1:50pm. If you look at the way content-based sites like flickr (rather than meta content based sites like del.icio.us), you rapidly find that links aren't enough, since new content always at a huge disadvantage because it has no links and there is no external system for users to find good new content. flickr solve this in two ways, by having "explore" functionality which focuses entirely on the previous two days' content and by sorting all query results with the most recent results first. Login or register to post comments See a continuation of this Submitted by Joe Clark (Florida State University) on May 18, 2006 - 7:08am. See a continuation of this line of inquiry. Login or register to post comments
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