Web 2.0 Mash-ups and the New Aggregators

Intro to Folksonomy/Tags/Social Networks

A key element of many of the new social networks is tags. Tags are simply another way to categorize information and in and of themselves don’t represent anything new. We’ve been filing articles into categories since the first blogging systems and methodical categorization methods have long been essential to the organization of information: libraries use the Dewey Decimal system, retailers have UPC codes, booksellers have ISBNs.

The difference between tags and categories is in the very different philosophy behind their use. Most information systems are built on order and strive to create unique identifiers. Chaos is controlled by having a very defined taxonomy and a class of gatekeepers trained in its use. A book is to have one single ISBN number, with the numbers doled out by a single agency that controls for duplication. In display, even the mix of hyphens within the number is set and contains information about publisher size. Contextual categories in blogs aren’t defined or enforced in the same way but they tend to maintain the same philosophy. Most bloggers assign only one category to each post and limit themselves to a relatively small and manageable number of categories.

Tags embrace chaos. They should be doled out liberally and with abandon. A single article or blog post might have a dozen or two dozen or even three dozen tags! Automatic keyword-generating algorithms exist that will pull out the one-hundred most commonly used words in ...