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September 05, 2007, 02:31 PM ET
Tough Talk About Tagging
A few years ago, it seemed as if everyone was talking about folksonomies — Web projects that let users “tag” items with keywords and create their own collaborative categorization systems.
And to be sure, there have been plenty of folksonomic success stories. Sites like Flickr (which lets users post and tag images) and del.icio.us (which does the same for Web pages) have built up reasonably robust classification systems, and plenty of blogs — the Wired Campus included — now make at least some use of tags.
But some observers are beginning to wonder if the promise of tagging has gone unfulfilled. Despite the popularity of folksonomies, writes Matt Mower of Curiouser and Curiouser, “the state of the art in tagging seems firmly wedged in 2003:”Tagging in 2007 seems to have advanced no further than a means by which one or more users of a site (or application) can group content around a loose framework of concepts. If you are lucky those concepts may express relationships but often they do not.
Along the same lines, Paolo Valdemarin says he’s still waiting for “truly advanced tagging tools” that will combine tags from different folksonomies and turn them into something useful. Professors who have experimented with Flickr and del.icio.us must surely have some thoughts on the topic: Have you gotten much out of tagging? Where should the field head next? (Thanks to David Weinberger for the links.) —Brock Read
Categories: Teaching
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