Part of the allure of classifying things by assigning tags to them is that the user can give free reign to sloppiness. There is no authority —human or computational— passing judgment on the appropriateness or validity of tags, because tags have to mak
Let's explore how the lower cognitive cost of tagging makes it popular...From my first encounter with tagging (on systems such as del.icio.us & flickr), I could feel how easy it was to tag. But it took me a while to understand the cognitive processes at w
Social bookmark tools are rapidly emerging on the Web. In such systems users are setting up lightweight conceptual structures called folksonomies. The reason for their immediate success is the fact that no specific skills are needed for participating. At
Del.icio.us tags aren’t like meta keyword tags because of the Del.icio.us Lesson. Meta keyword tags provide no personal value whatsoever. All of their value is social. They’re for aggregation engines to find and tell other people about. In other words
Though I am excited by organic, individual tagging tools there are situations where introducing this can be problematic. Health information content, in particular, seems to be a strong candidate for more centralized, regulated classification and tagging..
The "expert" arrogance that occasionally accompanies taxonomies...which are essential...information management tools...[does not acknowledge that] taxonomies are never done, they are not easily emergent, they are incredibly resource-intensive, and they do
We need solutions that can help the many people whose terms and vocabulary are left out of the taxonomy... The simple idea that people’s actions model meaning better than a directory (even a flexible directory) is a critical step forward in thinking ab