“We all grew up knowing about tags. We had tags in our clothes, we had them on our holiday presents, we played a game called tag, and some even used spray cans to tag their turf. All of these uses of tag have different meanings, but unless we understand the context and/or the person using the word tag we do not know what they mean. This can be a problem with tagging on the web, but like everything else there are two sides to the story and there are some great benefits from tagging, if it is done well.” (Thomas Vander Wal – OK/Cancel)

“We have gone past a critical mass of connectivity between people that has introduced a new revolutionary ability to communicate, collaborate and share goods online.” (Emanuele Quintarelli – ISKOI) – courtesy of langemarkscafe

“Knowledge management, information architecture, content management, search engine technology and portalization are just a few of the evolutionary benefits of implementing meta data at the enterprise level. The meta data product line serves as the foundation from which processes and services can be built.” (Metadata Portal) – courtesy of columntwo

Overview of relevant links by del.icio.us according to Michael Scudder (del.icio.us) – courtesy of marcel van mackelenbergh

“The big advantage of adding metadata in the form of facets is that we know how to make an easy to use interface for facets.” (Peter van Dijck)

“The narrative that tells of the first man and woman encountering the tree of knowledge focuses on its tempting fruit. But after we took the bite, we apparently looked up and got the idea that knowledge is shaped like the tree’s branching structure: Big concepts contain smaller ones that contain smaller ones yet. Over the millennia, we have fashioned the structures of knowledge in just such tree-like ways, from the departmental organization of universities (liberal arts contains history and history contains ancient Chinese history) to the hierarchy of species. The idea that knowledge is shaped like a tree is perhaps our oldest knowledge about knowledge.” (David Weinberger – JOHO)

“(…) a place to keep links to the articles you read and the websites you use, and a place to find them again. It is also a place where you can discover new articles and websites through sharing your links with other users. By saving your links and references to Connotea they are instantly on the web, which means that they are available to you from any computer and that you can point your friends and colleagues to them. In Connotea, every user’s links are visible both to visitors and to every other user, and different users’ libraries are linked together through the use of common tags or common bookmarks.” (About Connotea)

“This paper reviews some current initiatives, as of early 2005, in providing public link management applications on the Web – utilities that are often referred to under the general moniker of ‘social bookmarking tools’. There are a couple of things going on here: 1) server-side software aimed specifically at managing links with, crucially, a strong, social networking flavour, and 2) an unabashedly open and unstructured approach to tagging, or user classification, of those links.” (Tony Hammond et al. – D-Lib Magazine April 2005)

“A recent article in the Society for Technical Communications’ Intercom magazine proclaimed that indexing is on the rise (Seth Maislin, “The Indexing Revival,” February, 2005), and that there is a renaissance of work in the field. But at the WritersUA March Conference, Microsoft’s Longhorn features session declared that Longhorn’s Help system will not contain an index, because ‘no one uses it’. Then, to add to the discussion, at that same conference Apple revealed that their next help engine will include synonym rings and will add a form of indexing back into their display. Who’s right? Who’s correctly predicting the trends?” (Jan Wright – WinWriters UA) – courtesy of usablehelp

“Today I want to talk about categorization, and I want to convince you that a lot of what we think we know about categorization is wrong. In particular, I want to convince you that many of the ways we’re attempting to apply categorization to the electronic world are actually a bad fit, because we’ve adopted habits of mind that are left over from earlier strategies.” (Clay Shirky’s Writings About the Internet)

“We benefit from folksonomies as the both the personal vocabulary and the social aspects help people to find and retain a tether to objects on the web that are an interest to them. Who is doing the tagging is important to understand and how the tags are consumed is an important factor.” (Thomas Vanderwal – Personal InfoCloud)

“Enter Web 2.0, a vision of the Web in which information is broken up into ‘microcontent’ units that can be distributed over dozens of domains. The Web of documents has morphed into a Web of data. We are no longer just looking to the same old sources for information. Now we’re looking to a new set of tools to aggregate and remix microcontent in new and useful ways.” (Richard MacManus & Joshua Porter – Digital Web Magazine)

“One of the most promising features of folksonomies is that there is no disconnect between the user’s words and the words on the site: the users words are the words on the site!” (Joshua Porter – User Interface Engineering)

“We are here going to remind you of hyperlinks in all their glory, sell you on the idea of bookmarking hyperlinks, point you at other folks who are doing the same, and tell you why this is a good thing. Just as long as those hyperlinks (or let’s call them plain old links) are managed, tagged, commented upon, and published onto the Web, they represent a user’s own personal library placed on public record, which – when aggregated with other personal libraries – allows for rich, social networking opportunities.” (Tony Hammond – D-Lib Magazine) – courtesy of lucdesk

“If HTML and the Web made all the online documents look like one huge book, RDF, schema, and inference languages will make all the data in the world look like one huge database. – Tim Berners-Lee 1999” (Labs SemWeb)

“In the quest to organize the Web’s information, an emerging approach is putting the power to categorize everything from links to digital photos into the hands of users.” (Matt Hicks – eWeek) – courtesy of lawrence lee

“I thought the panel went well overall. Enough friction to keep the discussion interesting, smart presentations from the panelists, and good questions from the audience helped keep things rolling.” (Gene Smith – Atomiq)

“mSpace helps people build knowledge from exploring those relationships. mSpace does this by offering several powerful tools for organizing an information space to suit a person’s interest: slicing, sorting, swapping, infoViews and preview cues.” (M.C. Schraefel) – courtesy of nooface

“While some continue to debate the usefulness of tag-based folksonomies, others are starting to build abstraction layers on top of a growing body of user-tagged data.” – (The Social Software Weblog) – courtesy of langemarks cafe

“(…) as more people understand what tags are, how they work and why they’re important, the number of participants in folksonomies has grown.” (Daniel Terdiman – Wired)