My colleague Elaine Peterson has an excellent article up on folksonomies called Beneath the Metadata, Some Philosophical Problems with Folksonomy. Here she builds a good comparison of both traditional cataloging and this type of social approach.
Others may have said it before, but one thing that I’m always interested in is the social aspect of this type of collaborative sense making. Digg, delicious, and even wikipedia are really good at capturing a “wave” of sense as users see it at a given moment. I’ve been teaching wikipedia in my classes and one way to describe the service is as a source for topic-based gossip. With folksnomies, you can get a good idea for how people view a collection of “stuff”.
My take on folksonomies is that it’s an excellent way to classify user groups and only a passable way to classify “stuff”.
That being said, it seems to me that just as an institution would probably never offer a search strategy but no browse strategy (unless you’re google), you would never offer just folksonomy access without some kind of controlled access to accompany it. It’s complementary, not revolutionary.
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