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:
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.
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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.