There seems to be a misunderstanding in the tagging world that taxonomies are rigid hierarchies defined from authorities on high. Good taxonomies are multifaceted hierarchies which grow among users as trees of knowledge.

If there is such a thing as good tagging verses poor tagging, I suggest that good tagging will take on board some of the lessons of multifaceted classification.

Tagging and classification are the same thing. Tags in blogs are no different from personal classifications. The use of multiple descriptors are attempts by individuals to create multi-faceted taxonomies.

As our quick analysis of Technorati’s top tags already indicates (www.supertaggers.co.uk) even the simplest multifaceted taxonomy adds value and an element of definition to an otherwise cloudy view.

The goal of supertaggers is to encourage the best tagging, as well as providing added value of tagging super structures.

More generally, I find the number of entirely spurious and misinformed statements within the ‘tagging literature’ to be deeply concerning. For example:

“But tagging is already a better fit for discovering and reflecting both personal and group mental models; does a better job of handling ambiguous or dynamic cases; provides judgment-related context (’funny’, ‘cool’); allows better mapping to communities of the like-minded; and is, on top of all of that, cheap cheap cheap”.

How, for example, can “judgment related context” possibly enhance resource discovery for users in a global information environment?!?! Mr Shirky states that tagging is “cheap, cheap, cheap”??? Well, I guess it depends on your definition of ‘cheap’ and precisely how frugal we want to be in our future information society. The implication of such frugality is, for many, quite obvious. Indeed, every statement in the above excerpt is exceedingly debatable but is nevertheless taken as absolute fact. Where is the evidence? Where? Even a session of rigorous desk-based research would not lead one to make such spurious claims. The evidence simply does not exist.

The bottom line is that folksonomies and tagging have yet to be exposed to any rigorous scientific enquiry and no amount of blogging can possibly substitute for this. It is something that my colleague and I wish to remedy (particularly since it is an extremely interesting area of research!). However, I’m confident that other work will gradually filter through the international information and computing science communities in due course and we will all be the better for it.

On the surface tagging seems to offer a new paradigm of organising information, one that reduces the cost of entry and so enables a long tail of participation to emerge. I’ve come to realise that the cost isn’t removed, instead…

one question, clay, to which i think an answer will help some of us more fully understand your position:

on a site like http://www.plasticbag.org/archives/, the creator of the content has “categorized” his blog entries in order to create a navigation method for accessing the archived content.

do you consider this practice to be a form of “self-tagging” or a “classification system” or neither?

when you propose “most places that offer digital categorization are only in the expensive and frustrating business of classification because they wrongly believe that is the best way to serve their users. That will change…”, would this include the “self-classification” (or whatever it is) of, say, http://www.plasticbag.org?

i’m a die-hard proponent of the “metadata IS navigation/navigation IS metadata” view, and i very much buy the idea that user-generated metadata can drive navigation that is highly responsive to the mental models of users, but i wonder about publishing content without ANY initial navigational structure at all, in the hopes that the “masses” will eventually accidentally run across it and “tag” it; which, after a critical mass is reached, would finally provide navigational access to that content. for

so, are you really proposing that site owners/content creators will eventually stop self-classifying their stuff? won’t most (perhaps even the amazons of the world) still want to “seed” their information space with a “default” navigational view?