There’s lots to read on tagging, but here are some interesting places to start:
Here’s an interesting IM chat with Joshua Schachter, who amused me immensely by begging me not to give too much publicity to his deli.cio.us website because his servers couldn’t handle all the traffic following any media mention. My brief IM chat with him will follow soon. I also chatted with Bowen Welle — that chat will appear soon, I hope — but here’s one post that drew me to seek him out.
Here’s Wikipedia’s definition of Folksonomy, which points out, inter alia, that “Folksonomies work best when a number of users all describe the same piece of information. For instance, on del.icio.us, many people have bookmarked wikipedia, each with a different set of words to describe it. Among the various tags used, del.icio.us shows that reference, wiki, and encyclopedia are the most popular.”
Talking of Wikipedia, the lively discussion on Many 2 Many has recently tackled the whole issue of Folksonomy, and of whether Wikipedia needs supervision. Louis Rosenfeld worries about folksonomies getting out of hand. Another, earlier, look at the same issues from Peter Merholz, and HeadShift, and Alex Wright, and the Laughing Meme.
I’ll try to keep adding links to my deli.cio.us taglist. Please do let me know of any other interesting links: This is really just a smattering of what is out there on what I hope is is a growing topic.