Folksonomy - How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Mess

Folksonomy - How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Mess. I found this podcast fascinating. It's a panel interview with Joshua Schachter (del.icio.us), Stewart Butterfield (Flickr), Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia) and Clay Shirky on different approaches to tags and the loose, user defined ontologies they create. The key distinction for me was the different purpose tagging has in each service. In del.icio.us people are tagging other people's things (URLs) for their own benefit (so they can find them more easily than with conventional bookmarks). The 'social software' benefit is effectively just a handy side effect. With Flickr people tag their own things for their own, and other people's benefit. With Wikipedia, a group of people tag to categorise content purely for other people's benefit. This has interesting implications in terms of the way things are tagged, and whether tags can be useful combined across a range of different services.