“On the other hand, imagine your emergency room surgeon is consulting a wiki of medical protocols that used a folksonomic classification system…”

My point was not that taxonomies don’t work. The particular problem that I am addressing actually has an existing thesaurus, and even a hierarchical tool for determining the correct terms. It’s very usable by professionals. It is totally unusable by authors or their peers. Could the tool be better? I’d like to think so, but that was my original question. I’d like to see one. I’d love nothing more than to slip behind the curtain and see what Getty is using.

BTW, I have nothing against using professional catalogers, but modern KM screams for disintermediation. As soon as you put middle-people in the process you add incredible cost and unacceptable lag. Folksonomies and user generated tagging, where not perfect squarely addresses these two issues. Is it good enough? That remains to be seen.

Would the ESP Game put the Getty catalogers out of a job? http://jonschull.blogspot.com/2006/12/human-computation-google-video.html

3. Yes we read the summaries as well as selected posts. To date we skim the postings as opposed to sub searching( not sure if this is a real term) the tag.

4. We tag for both promotion and outreach. As a more general comment we also tag to categorize for future retrival (cataloging) of the material by topic. We find ourselves regularly challenged by the quandry of “broad” vs. “specific” tagging.

In my mind, tagging is great for browsing and for scalability, and it’s much easier to implement. But (good) taxonomies are far superior when people need to quickly see comprehensive results, and can be really helpful in situations where you don’t have critical mass for tagging.

To Marnie’s comment about taxonomies being hard to use because you don’t know the “right” word to use - that to me is a downside of a *bad* taxonomy, not the approach in general. To my mind, a huge upside of a good taxonomy (carefully created and maintained over time) is that it will map like terms together so you can use the terms that make sense to you rather than having to channel the tagger or taxonomist in order to find things.

The Cross Blog Discussion of the NpTechTag has generated some comments and blog posts that I’ve summarized below. Let’s begin with big picture question that Gavin raised: What purpose do folksonomies serve? How are they different from taxonomies? Gavin…

While at iapps, we developed a web development and hosting platform that relies heavily on the traditional taxonomic model - that of the content experts (the owners of the content of a given web property) providing the categories to which content could be attributed. This is, essentially, tagging of content with pre-defined folksonomies. We deliberately took this approach because, as web site and application designers (and admittedly, having some control-freakish tendencies), we didn’t want the content to get too dispersed and encounter problems where, say, a list of categories would get too long and unwieldy, or a horizontal navigation bar would run off the page and blow the page layout away. I think this speaks to one of Gavin’s points, and in that context, I certainly agree.

But the types of web sites we were building, mostly public facing web sites for foundations and nonprofits, serve a very different purpose than some of the social software applications today that use folksonomies. Folksonomies are certainly sloppy. But a lot of this sloppiness and the inefficiencies in finding relevant content can be attributed to the embryonic stage of social content organization and consumption that the Internet is currently in. But as the semantic web continues to emerge and the user interface designers and information architects adapt to these new paradigms, I anticipate many improvements in how content is “organized” and consumed on the Web.

The other point I want to make is this: the big social sites (My Space, Flickr, del.icio.us, etc.) are not tailored to any one specific group of people. They’re for anyone and everyone. The only way to target content to yourself in these environments is through your social connections on these sites and folksonomies/tagging. And as Gavin and others have pointed out, it’s messy and not particularly targeted in many cases. But as more “hyper local”, or location-based, sites and communities of interest/practice sites come online, I foresee a dramatic shift in the ability to catch and consume more relevant content (a good example of this can be found at http://outside.in). And it’s in these environments, where the content is at the outset more targeted, and there’s more content and human organization at a local or topic-based level, that I anticipate deriving more benefits from the folksonomy model.

Google Video lets you google videos (of course) by their titles and a brief description of each. Each page links to other matches. That’s OK, but predictable. YouTube lets posters tag each clip themselves. For example, I tagged this clip of my 12 seconds on Good Morning America with “boutin wired slate gma.” Whenever you play a YouTube clip, the page shows a half-dozen potential matches. A tag like “slate” could mean all sorts of things, so each page mixes perfect matches with what-the-huh results. A documentary on Scientology links to a South Park episode, which links to comedian Pablo Francisco. A few clicks later I’m watching some merry prankster get an unexpected smackdown. In Web 2.0-speak, this is a “folksonomy.” In English, it means YouTube is a mix of every video genre imaginable.