I’ll follow Clay’s lead although my contributions are rather less eminent in this space. I’d wait for David and others to speak up, they having a longer trail of links to contribute, but there’s no time like the present and I’ve already got all these tabs open.

I’ve posted in the past on the subject of tags and spontaneous categorization mostly at two weblogs. One is Radio Free Blogistan, a group weblog about blogging. The other is The Power of Many, a companion website to my book of the same name, published last year.

Whereas most of Clay’s posts are well reasoned essays in tone and length, the vast majority of mine take the form “hey, look what that smart person over there just said.” Still, in the hopes that pointers are useful, I will contribute the list of entries I found in my recent search-driven survey of my own posts.

Wanted: Bayesianly Faceted Weblog: “Let the computer figure out when I’m jotting in my writer’s journal, when I’m commenting on something I experienced, when I’m discussing work or politics or my new book or baseball or the dsm-iv. And death to categories! those inadequate cave-crayon drawings of taxonomy and metadata. The whole problem with that paradigm is that it’s always static at the next level up. You have to engineer flow into the sorting and presentation. You outgrow every fixed system, no matter how good in the snapshot moment.”

Jacob Lodwick on tags and the mind (pointer from RFB, posted by contributor Christopher Filkins): “What if we could tag not just photos, but also other tags? We could start to build a tagweb. When a tagweb is created from your tags, that tagweb works perfectly within the realm of what makes sense to you. The reason nobody came up with this before Flickr was because we didn’t have Flickr as a visible reference point. You can’t just imagine something out of the blue without first thinking about related things.”

Deep thinking on folksonomies and a stream of photos from Iraq (a pointer to a post by Tim “Geodog” Bishop): “I have recently started to use Flickr and Del.icio.us on a regular basis. Why? Because they turn out to be great ways of following a conversation on the web.”

Why not tag everything? “But now this whole ‘folksonomy’ thing (such as the group tagging at Flickr and Delicious) is making me wonder: Why can’t I tag every email, every action I take through my ‘puter as I do it or as it falls away?”

Tagging bookmarks nonhierarchically (a pointer to Tom “plasticbag” Coates): “To summarise the problems with current bookmarking systems then, we could say that (1) the process is slow and annoying (2) that it requires us to continually refine and redevelop our taxonomies if we’re going to keep track of everything, (3) that URLs can belong in a number of bins and that (4) we can be left with unmanageably large lists. An ideal system would therefore speed the process up of both bookmarking a site and retrieving it later. An ideal system would try to alleviate the problems of categorisation and would work as an a priori assumption that a URL might wish to be stored in multiple bins. An ideal system would not display all the links by default. An ideal system would, in fact, use tags….”

Email and Browser URL Extraction and Search via a Personal del.icio.us (a pointer to Jeremy Zawodny): “What I really need is a tool that acts like a personal del.icio.us that’s automatically fed from the combination of URLs embedded in e-mail messages as well as my browser history. It could keep a database of those URLs, count the frequency with which I visit them as well as how often they appear in e-mail that I send or receive. And if it provided the ability to tag and annotate the URLs, all the better.”

How would you tag yourself? (a pointer to Jeff “Buzzmachine” Jarvis): “That’s a tough question. So far all I can up with is watches TV, seems sort of high, A Jewish Lexington Steele, hungry, snowflake (I used to teach high school in Brooklyn), and Gina’s husband… But in the new world, I guess I had better tag myself before my shrink does it for me.”

Napsterization on real existing folksonomies (a pointer to Mary Hodder): “What I’m wondering about is how quickly the spammers will figure this all out, and use it to their advantage. Currently, even though I block comment spam across my blogs, and know that Technorati, Feedster, PubSub et al, as well as Google, don’t log comments or at least comment links because of the spam problem, the comment spammers try ever increasingly clever tricks. They might leave 500 comments in a hour (like I wouldn’t notice) each with a different IP address, a different URL they want linked to for google juice, a different return email address, different products. All in the same blast. Removing them is automatic, but if they are clever, they’ll figure out just how to get one or two through… and if I believe I’ve gotten them all, they’ve succeeded with just a couple.”

Clay Shirky here. I’ve been writing about tagging since late 2003, when I first wrote about del.icio.us over on Many-to-Many (a group weblog about social software.) By way of introduction, here are excerpts from some of my M2M posts on the subject of tagging and folksonomy:

Folksonomies + controlled vocabularies: “The advantage of folksonomies isn’t that they’re better than controlled vocabularies, it’s that they’re better than nothing, because controlled vocabularies are not extensible to the majority of cases where tagging is needed.”

Folksonomies are a forced move: “It doesn’t matter whether we “accept” folksonomies, because we’re not going to be given that choice. The mass amateurization of publishing means the mass amateurization of cataloging is a forced move.”

The Innovator’s Lemma: “If we’re going to let just any old person write whatever they want and then make it available globally, we’re going to have to extend the same freedom to classifying the resulting flood of material. And critics will be able to say, rightly, that such a system will lack the coherence we would have had, had we not gone and let everyone publish willy-nilly. To which the only sensible reply is “Oh well.”

Tags != folksonomies && Tags != Flat name spaces: “This last point is key — the number one fucked up thing about ontology, out of a rich list of such things, is the need to declare today what category contains what as a prediction about the future. … A system that requires you to predict the future up front is guaranteed to get worse over time.”

Folksonomy: The Soylent Green of the 21st Century: “Every time you pick between the Heinz and the Del Monte, it’s like clicking a link, the simplest possible informative transaction. Your choice says “The Heinz, at $2.25 per 28 oz., is a better buy than the Del Monte at $1.89.” This is so simple it doesn’t seem like you’re producing metadata at all — you’re just getting ketchup for your fish sticks. … That looks like cheap metadata to me. And the secret is that that metadata is created through aggregate interaction.”