(the title’s from noise between stations)
I have 23 items tagged ‘tags_&_taxonomies’ at del.icio.us. Of these, I find Jon Udell’s and Clay Shirky’s posts, and Peter Merholz’s twoposts, the ones to which I return most often, with a special mention for Gene Smith whose post ends, ‘the idea of socially constructed classification schemes (with no input from an information architect) is interesting. Maybe one of these services [Furl, Flickr, del.icio.us] will manage to build a social thesaurus’.
Adam Mathes’ paper of last month pulls much of this together.
Some clips to end on:
This flexibility, and the movement between subjective (keyword-like) and collective (category-like) taxonomy is what makes tags such an interesting development … It is also (and I’m struggling to find a better way to put this, and failing) quite deep. Categorisation is a political mess. The only way to keep my semantic regimen functional is to make damn sure you put things in the right sack. I will make you do it by writing inflexible software structures that force you to do it, or if, for example, we’re out of the software bubble, and talking about good old fashioned categories such as ‘good’ and ‘bad’, I’ll construct a social/economic/ideological system that reinforces certain aesthetic norms that mean you’ll have to use my categories or my system will make your life unpleasant and painful. Saul Albert
… the most important job of the new generation of librarians is to build into information objects sufficient metadata that any organization can create its own taxonomy. Taxonomies are tools, so there’s no such thing as the One Right Taxonomy, just as can-openers aren’t more right than asphalt spreaders. By building in sufficient metadata — no easy task — diverse groups now and forever can build taxonomies that suit their needs. It means giving up the dream of Universal Reason. But we woke from that dream a long time ago. David Weinberger
I think the lack of hierarchy, synonym control and semantic precision are precisely why it works. Free typing loose associations is just a lot easier than making a decision about the degree of match to a pre-defined category (especially hierarchical ones). It’s like 90% of the value of a “proper” taxonomy but 10 times simpler. (Of course, I don’t know if there is a lesson there for the everyday work of IAs – different kind of problem.) Stewart Butterfield
