More on tagging
Interesting; on the heels of my post yesterday about filing vs. tagging comes Joi Ito, pointing toward a post by David Weinberger that seems to resonate:
Peter Merholz, AKA peterme, has an excellent article at Adaptive Path called Metadata for the Masses: “But what if we could somehow peek inside our users’ thought processes to figure out how they view the world? One way to do that is through ethnoclassification [1] — how people classify and categorize the world around them.
He takes del.icio.us and Flickr as examples of “ethnoclassification” (a phrase he tracks back to Susan Leigh Star),. (I am enamored of the branch of ethnoclassification on exhibit at del.icio.us if only because people have started calling it “folksonomy.”) He looks at the benefits. Then he addresses the problems, and suggests the paths out of the forest we’re making for ourselves. Jay Fienberg points us also to Jon Udell’s article on “collaborative knowledge gardening.”
Joi sez:
I’ve also been looking at some related issues (e.g., here, here, here, here and here), but Peter has the advantage of knowing what he’s talking about.I totally agree that this “ethnoclassification” is really an amazing solution to the metadata problem. Although, as they point out, there are some problems, I think that we’ll find solutions. I feeling very taggy these days. I think there should be more cross-site tag linking. Blog categories, wiki pages, music meta data, and many other things can be “tagged”. TAGCON 2005! Sorry. Just kidding.