Beth started a cross-blog discussion about tagging and folksonomies, and I thought I’d weigh in. Gavin started this all off by posting a good and interesting set of questions about the efficiency of folksonomies.
I’ll agree with Gavin, that folksonomies sure are less efficient, and a lot more messy than taxonomies. But is efficiency the most important thing? And, there is one really big thing that using taxonomies miss, that folksonomies get: who is doing the categorizing? Taxonomies are developed by specific people for specific purposes, and as such, are limited by worldview and perspective. Gavin says: “I’d recommend the wisdom of a few experts within that crowd.” Good point, except – who are those experts? What is their worldview, and how does that effect the taxonomy that they come up with – and how does that determine the effect of a taxonomy on people who are not the experts?
I think that it is certainly possible to disseminate some guidelines (that some people will pay attention to) for the use of the nptech tag that could increase the signal/noise ratio. But I think the larger question about folksonomies is important: is efficiency all there is, and in what ways are folksonomies a way for the “folks” (rather than “experts”) to have access to the process of categorizing their own content, and content they care about?
Technorati Tags: nptech, tagging, folksonomies
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“I think that it is certainly possible to disseminate some guidelines (that some people will pay attention to) for the use of the nptech tag that could increase the signal/noise ratio.”
What do those guidelines look like? Is it a vocabularly or adding sub-categories? Or adding another tag that indicates audience as Allan Benamer has suggested for his manseo search engine? Or does it mean something completely different like suggesting that people use more than just the nptech tag and to include a one-sentence description?
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