My name’s Gene Smith. Like Peter, I have one foot in the world of information architecture.

Aside from helping spread the folksonomy meme, I coordinated and moderated the folksonomies panel at this year’s Information Architecture Summit. Lately I’ve been frustrated by the unbridled enthusiasm surrounding tagging, so I wrote a piece comparing it to the New Economy enthusiasm of the not-too-distant past.

But my main interest in tagging these days is practical. I helped a client build a folksonomy application for their intranet, which generated a flood of useful metadata along with a lot of metacrap. Even though they found tags useful on the whole, they also found some aspects of it confusing (the lack of accuracy and authority, in particular, were a concern). So the big issues for me are joining tags with other metadata systems and deepening our knowledge of how to make sense of tags and tagging behaviour. On that last point, I wonder if everyone’s seen Ericka Menchen survey of del.icio.us users?