The tagging debate continues

One of the hot topics at PC Forum was tagging – a topic I have covered before.  At PC Forum, David Weinberger and Esther Dyson led an informal afternoon discussion on tagging that wandered quite a bit, but did a good job of exposing the tension between those who welcome an emergent approach to organizing resources and and those who yearn for more structure.  Adam Bosworth weighed in after the session with a lengthy blog praising tagging as a sloppy KISS innovation and warning against the ontologists that want to impose order in this arena.

The discussion around tagging and folksonomies continues to build steam.  In addition to the contributions I mentioned in my earlier post, there is a somewhat cryptic transcript of the discussion on the Folksonomy panel at ETech here.  A more nourishing blog of discussions on tagging and folksonomies from the Information Architecture Summit in Montreal earlier this month is available here. Lou Rosenfeld has a good set of comments on folksonomies and meta-data ecologies in his blog.

While I am sympathetic with Adam’s celebration of bottom-up, emergent (and, yes, therefore very sloppy) systems, I can’t help but wonder if it will take more than a purely bottom-up approach to develop really useful (i.e., scalable) social tagging systems.  If I reflect on the successful virtual communities, they combine an effective moderator with emergent discussions. Open source software, slashdot, Wikipedia – all of these emergent systems have developed sophisticated governance structures to shape the bottom up contributions of their participants.

Why am I spending so much time thinking about this topic?  Because the challenge of dealing with abundance in resources will be a growing issue in networked environments.  Any mechanisms that help us to sort through the proliferation of options and find the resources that are truly useful to us will have great value.  Mechanisms that capture and build on the insights and experience of others will be even more valuable because they will create a classic increasing returns opportunity.  That’s the potential of tagging – if it can scale.

Btw, here’s a question for everyone – who owns the tags?