I am Thomas Vander Wal and I am pleased to be invited to have a place to post and chat about the subject of tagging. I have spent much time pondering, playing with, researching, and developing tools with light metadata and tagging since at least the early 90s. I had seen tagging as only partially working, but having too many faults to be practical. That was until I came across del.icio.us. Del.icio.us seemed to change the usefulness of tagging, where tagging was completely messy prior, having an identity tied to the tag applied to the object being tagged allowed for easier means to derive clarity. Not long after Flickr added tagging to their incubating photo sharing tool. While Flickr does not provide easy means for everybody to tag information nor an easy means to see all the items an identity has tagged.

It was around this change in tagging that Gene Smith on the Information Architecture Institute asked what we should call this tagging that is bottom-up, social, and emergent along the lines of del.icio.us and Flickr. At this point I chimed in folksonomy, which quickly turned into a meme after Gene blogged about it.

Since that point I have been keeping a collections of other’s tagging and folksonomy works bookmarked in my and writing about it on my personal blog Folksonomy :: Off the Top and my more formal blog Folksonomy :: Archives :: Personal InfoCloud.