Peter Merholz here. I am an “information architect,” which, I think, makes me part of the “well-designed metadata crowd,” though if Clay saw the metadata we produce, he might think again before saying “well-designed.”

I’ve published various and sundry on folksonomies/tags.

For my job-job, I wrote “Metadata for the Masses,” an essay on the value of tagging, and how it can be intelligently integrated with more formal approaches to classification and categorization. I think perhaps the most overlooked, yet potentially rewarding, opportunity in tagging is to meld them with the good, formal work that people have done before. There’s no reason they can’t exist together.

Later, I wrote, “Tag Inversion – When Metadata Isn’t,” which discusses how while tags originated as metadata, to describe something after the fact, we’re now getting tags first and the “data” later.

In terms of what others have written, I find Adam Mathes’ Folksonomies – Cooperative Classification and Communication Through Shared Metadata to be among the best. Go read it.