[Web4lib] del.icio.us tags and bookmarking sites -- WHY DO IT?

[Josh Kuperman]

I recently started reading Web4Lib again, after checking out Karen
Schneider's blog and learning about "gormangate". What is going on is
very interesting and important. On one side are those who feel that
organizing and accessing information is an important activity worthy
or study, training, etc and most importantly requiring governance -
authoritative decision making. On the other side are those who believe
that collaborative, anarchic, free-for-all methods work best. As such
you have those who might be perfectly content to see what is tagged
under chess, osx, linux, or even read_later at http://del.icio.us in
there self-generation folksonomy, while others might insist that
"meaningful research"  requires a rigid thesaurus and classification
system.

This is really only one of many manifestations of the issues at hand.
It is certainly part of the same debase regardless of the subject
heading assigned: "search vs browse", "folksonomy vs taxonomy",  etc. 
The issues being (1) once data is machine accessible are you better
off organizing it, in order to search, or do you search everything in
order to organize and (2) do you need someone in charge, or do you
simply do your own thing and share that with others.

I tend to prefer the anarchic models (no controlled vocabularies,
seach wins over browse, etc) and the views of Clay Shirkey, Jimmy
Wales, Brewster Kahle, and others. I'm sure others can experss it
better, but it seems that many people are missing the point that there
is a major debate going on.

--
Josh Kuperman
josh.kuperman at gmail.com

On 5/23/05, Drew, Bill <drewwe at morrisville.edu> wrote:
> I posted this to my blog this morning.   I would really like to know
> this stuff but I am having a hard time getting the importance of it from
> what I have read so far.