Spatial memory vs linguistic memory

My colleague Dan is about to launch a new version of his software. They've replaced their existing files and folders system with a tag based one. That's gotten me thinking further about the benefits of taxonomies vs folksonomies. The thing folksonomies lack is the ability to use our spatial memories. With a taxonomy, represented by a navigation tree I can remember physically 'where' I put something. It's up near the 'top' of the tree, and about four folders to the 'right', and about 'halfway down' the list of files. Of course this spatial distinction is arbitrary, the computer could display those folders many different ways depending on sort order etc. Most of the time though, we leave the tree displaying a particular way. With folksonomies there's no 'where'. Everythings in this kind of void, addressable through search and tags. It relies solely on our ability to remember words, to remember what we called something, rather than where we put it. Don't get me wrong, I love folksonomies, and am an avid user of Flickr, del.icio.us, openomy and other tag based sites. Maybe position in a tag cloud might help us use spatial memory to achieve similar results? I'm intrigued to see how easy/hard it will be for people to shift to folksonomy style approaches. I wonder if people who rely heavily on their spatial memories will find it harder than those who are more linguistically oriented.

Filed in: folksonomy taxonomy ontology