“Tagging offers a potentially powerful way for a company to organize information by making fresh content immediately searchable, letting users designate terms that make sense to them and providing users with a sense of ownership. This ability for tags to provide so much content-describing power for ordinary folks has given rise to the term ‘folksonomy’, as opposed to the more restrictive sounding ‘taxonomy’.” (Michael Fitzgerald – CIO Magazine) – courtesy of keithinstone

“The digital revolution is enabling knowledge to slip the bonds of the physical which had, silently, shaped it. Now we get to see its ‘natural’ shape. What does it look like? How big are topics when they aren’t determined by the economics of paper? Who gets to organize it? What are the new principles we’re using to organize it? David Weinberger proposes that in the digital world, the most ‘natural’, efficient and responsive way to manage knowledge is to create huge, distributed piles of leaves, each tagged with as much metadata as possible – including treating the content as metadata – and postponing until the last minute the taxonomizing of the information. What will be the social effects as we move from trees to piles of leaves?” (David Weinberger – Oxford Internet Institute Webcasts)

“Personomies are digital manifestations of an individual. Personomies combine identity (who you are), activity (what you do) and sociality (who you know). They include emails, contacts, blog posts, comments, purchases, page views, forms filled, bookmarks, ads clicked, chats, feeds subscribed and more. All these bits of data that can be tracked back to me belong in my personomy.” (Pierre Guillaume Wielezynski – Personomies) – courtesy of boingboing

“It’s more interesting to find a like mind than just a resource.” (Christian Crumlish – tagsonomy)

“To date, tag clouds have been applied to just a few kinds of focuses (links, photos, albums, blog posts are the more recognizable). In the future, expect to see specialized tag cloud implementations emerge for a tremendous variety of semantic fields and focuses: celebrities, cars, properties or homes for sale, hotels and travel destinations, products, sports teams, media of all types, political campaigns, financial markets, brands, etc.” (Joe Lamantia) – courtesy of columntwo

“In this article we look at what makes folksonomies work. We agree with the premise that tags are no replacement for formal systems, but we see this as being the core quality that makes folksonomy tagging so useful. We begin by looking at the issue of ‘sloppy tags’, a problem to which critics of folksonomies are keen to allude, and ask if there are ways the folksonomy community could offset such problems and create systems that are conducive to searching, sorting and classifying. We then go on to question this ‘tidying up’ approach and its underlying assumptions, highlighting issues surrounding removal of low-quality, redundant or nonsense metadata, and the potential risks of tidying too neatly and thereby losing the very openness that has made folksonomies so popular.” (Marieke Guy and Emma Tonkin – DLib Magazine 12.1)

“The main focus of this presentation is not that folksonomies should be seen as a replacement to taxonomy, but as a means to augment taxonomies (if there is one in place). As was resoundingly echoed by others on the panel, taxonomies are hard work and expensive to build and maintain. The cost and effort are often reasons why taxonomies are not exhaustive nor emergent, as budgets and time constraints provide limits. Most often we follow the Pareto Principle (also know as the 80/20 rule) where we focus on 80 percent of the use with 20 percent of the resources (in reality we aim toward something more like a 90/40 rule), but we do have limitations. Taxonomies are also authoritative, but this is problematic for the people who have a vocabulary that is different than the authoritative vocabulary(or more correctly vocabularies). This means a taxonomy will most often have a limited view, which is not a reason to stop taxonomies, but a reason to augment them.” (Thomas Vander Wal – Personal InfoCloud)

“Examination of the systemic properties and forms of interaction that characterize classification and categorization reveals fundamental syntactic differences between the structure of classification systems and the structure of categorization systems. These distinctions lead to meaningful differences in the contexts within which information can be apprehended and influence the semantic information available to the individual. Structural and semantic differences between classification and categorization are differences that make a difference in the information environment by influencing the functional activities of an information system and by contributing to its constitution as an information environment.” (Elin K. Jacob) – courtesy of vuk

“2005 has proven that tags are both big (in the financial sense) and useful. Whether or not tagging is a game-changer will, I think, depend on what Yahoo, Amazon and Google do with tags in 2006. But with three big players in the tagging game there’s a lot of opporunity for innovation.” (Gene Smith – Tagsonomy)

“If you’ve been to a technology event recently, especially one with a high concentration of digerati, you may have seen someone stand up and tell everyone what the event’s Flickr tag is.” – (Daniel Terdiman – C|Net)

“The memetic web uses meme IDs from a set of memespace taxonomies to tag web page content. Meme tags greatly improve the precision and recall of search engines. The memography wiki establishes a new social classification system. It provides taxonomies and pages that describe what each meme is about. Anyone can tag pages with memes from memography, or follow rules to create non-conflicting memes for corporate and personal use. Memelinks to aboutness pages are URIs that can be used as RDF properties for the semantic web.” – courtesy of petermorville

“(…) I love Wikis and they are incredible tools, but one has to understand the boundaries. Wikis are emergent information tools and they are social tools. They are one of the best collaboration tools around, they even work very well for personal uses. But, like anything else it takes understanding on how to use them and use the information in them.” (Thomas Vander Wal)

“(…) the beauty of tagging is that it taps into an existing cognitive process without adding add much cognitive cost. At the cognitive level, people already make local, conceptual observations. Tagging decouples these conceptual observations from concerns about the overall categorical scheme. The challenge for tagging systems is to then do what the brain does – intelligent computation to make sense of these local observations, and an efficient, predictable way to ensure findability.” (Rashmi Sinha)

“Collaborative tagging describes the process by which many users add metadata in the form of keywords to shared content. Recently, collaborative tagging has grown in popularity on the web, on sites that allow users to tag bookmarks, photographs and other content. In this paper, we analyze the structure of collaborative tagging systems as well as their dynamical aspects. Specifically, we discovered regularities in user activity, tag frequencies, kinds of tags used, bursts of popularity in bookmarking and a remarkable stability in the relative proportions of tags within a given url. We also present a dynamical model of collaborative tagging that predicts these stable patterns and relates them to imitation and shared knowledge.” (Scott Golder and Bernardo A. Huberman – Information Dynamics Laboratory, HP Labs) – courtesy of vukcosic

“(…) a native Mac OS X (‘Cocoa/Aqua’) application for thesaurus construction.” (LGOSystems) – courtesy of theotherblog

“One key takeaway from the Web 2.0 panel was that data, interface and metadata no longer need to go hand in hand. When working on an application/website, one thinks of the overall picture including the data, the metadata, and the interface. With Web 2.0 apps, the data might be from one place, the metadata from another, and the interface from a third party or a remix. The diagram below shows the move towards Web 2.0 along with examples.” (Rashmi Sinha)

“Presented to Vera Rhoads User Interaction with Information Systems class in the Master of Information Managment program at University of Maryland. This was presented to the class on July 26, 2005 and included elements from previous folksonomy presentations.” (Thomas Vander Wal)

“Because hierarchies has been the designated one size fits all solution to all our organizational needs, we break our semantically pure hierarchies by overstretching their bounds. As a result, we end up with messy hierarchies that are unusable and unmaintainable.” (OSAF Projects wiki)

“(…) faceted navigation of del.icio.us feeds. An experimental service.” (Siderean Software) – courtesy of marcel van mackelenbergh