Tag Literacy

@article{citeulike:384364, abstract = {Part of the allure of classifying things by assigning tags to them is that the user can give free reign to sloppiness. There is no authority —human or computational— passing judgment on the appropriateness or validity of tags, because tags have to make sense first and foremost to the individual who assigns and uses them. And yet, the whole point of distributed classification systems (DCSs) such as del.icio.us and flickr is that the aggregation of inherently private goods (tags and what they describe) has public value: When people use the same tag to point to different resources they are organizing knowledge in a manner, commonly referred to as a folksonomy, that makes sense to them and to others like them. In other words, the tag is the object that brings a resource and a social group together via the shared meaning of a word (although tags also serve to form connections between words and new meanings, as for example when you encounter a link to the Center for Alternative Technology when looking at the tag 'cat').}, author = {Mejias, Ulises A. }, citeulike-article-id = {384364}, journal = {i d e a n t:}, keywords = {collaboration, ethnography, folksonomies, social\_classification, tag\_literacy, tagging}, posted-at = {2007-01-02 03:10:53}, priority = {0}, title = {Tag Literacy}, url = {http://ideant.typepad.com/ideant/2005/04/tag\_literacy.html} }

TY - JOUR ID - citeulike:384364 L3 - citeulike-article-id:384364 TI - Tag Literacy JF - i d e a n t: N2 - Part of the allure of classifying things by assigning tags to them is that the user can give free reign to sloppiness. There is no authority —human or computational— passing judgment on the appropriateness or validity of tags, because tags have to make sense first and foremost to the individual who assigns and uses them. And yet, the whole point of distributed classification systems (DCSs) such as del.icio.us and flickr is that the aggregation of inherently private goods (tags and what they describe) has public value: When people use the same tag to point to different resources they are organizing knowledge in a manner, commonly referred to as a folksonomy, that makes sense to them and to others like them. In other words, the tag is the object that brings a resource and a social group together via the shared meaning of a word (although tags also serve to form connections between words and new meanings, as for example when you encounter a link to the Center for Alternative Technology when looking at the tag 'cat'). KW - collaboration KW - ethnography KW - folksonomies KW - social_classification KW - tag_literacy KW - tagging AU - Mejias, Ulises UR - http://ideant.typepad.com/ideant/2005/04/tag_literacy.html ER -