I’m finding that in del.icio.us I’m using keywords that no one else uses. Does this mean I’m an anti-social folksonomist?
This discovery reminds me that it’s important for findability to have tags that others will use too. On sites where popularity counts, it might be better to match others’ tags depending on what your end goal is – is your goal to categorize for your own easy retrieval later, or to tag so that others can see what you’ve tagged as being similar to their own findings?
For example, I use a tag called “blogthis” for items that have caught and held my interest but I don’t have time to immediately write a blog post about the item. Apparently no one else uses this tag! Or if they are using a “blogthis” tag, it’s those items aren’t shared.
Tagging is so easy, especially the way it’s implemented on sites like flickr and del.icio.us. But what conscious decisions are you making when you select a tag? This article has a good cognitive analysis of the act of tagging. To me, the lovely and freeing part about folksonomies for taxonomy is the decoupling of concerns about “matching” others tags and the ability to have multiple categories with similar meanings.
What does easy tagging mean for indexing professionals? Is it the crowdsourcing of indexing? Or is the printed book still a strong enough meme that a professional index is a requirement for certain media? Or is it a third, hybrid being, with identity and authority tied up in the tag selection?