Great post on folksonomy from Bokardo.com:
Folksonomy Notes: Considering the Downsides, Behavioral Trends, and Adaptation
One thing that I mentioned in response to Liz’s post was that I feel we should keep in mind how adaptive we humans are. It is a fundamental talent we have. Too often, I think, we ignore this quality, pushing for consistency over everything else, when all we need is a little explanation of how things work. Once we know how they work, we’re fine.
I’m not advocating a willy-nilly approach to designing architectures for humans: I’m advocating a willy-nilly approach to designing architectures by humans, who use a willy-nilly approach when reading and writing and speaking words.
and another on tagging by Tim Bray: What Do Tags Mean?
I think that it would be nice if a huge number of web pages converged on using a simple, flat, shared set of tags with entries like vancouver and mac os x and tsunami relief, which the current setup works well for.
But I think it would also be nice if, once we have Atom, there are feeds about Petroleum Geology with their own tags, and feeds about Military Training too, and they each have their own drill tag. Which Atom would support nicely.
Of course, the only people who would need to know about the Petroleum or Military tags would be people specifically looking for that kind of stuff; someone looking for a drill tag generically would probably get both and maybe that would be fine.
Bottom line: I suspect Technorati, and anyone else who takes this up, should offer an (optional) “scheme” field in their tag search capability, which would be handy for those who care and invisible for those who don’t.
1. Kevin Marks on January 25, 2005 6:22 AM writes...
See above - the tagspace URL is effectively a scheme, and we preserve it, but don't display it at the moment.
Permalink to Comment2. James Tauber on January 25, 2005 7:27 AM writes...
Some of my own recent entries on the topic:
Wikipedia as a URI Lookup Service - where I suggest Wikipedia as a source of URIs for disambiguated categories/tag
Translations, Glosses, Tags and Folksonomies - where I describe some issues with tagging that reminded me of similar issues in translation and lexicography http://jtauber.com/blog/2005/01/05/translations,_glosses,_tags_and_folksonomies
Tag the Tags - crazy idea to make tags just a little more RDF-like http://jtauber.com/blog/2005/01/05/tag_the_tags
Delicious Trackbacks and Leonardo - relating tagging to tracking back to category URIs (with particular reference to my home-grown blogging software, Leonardo) http://jtauber.com/blog/2005/01/07/delicious_trackbacks_and_leonardo
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