I've been using Trac for project management since last summer, and I am really enjoying it. On Trac's mailing list, a thread started this week about a macro someone wrote that lets wiki authors assign tags to wiki pages. This eventually reached Jon Udell who mentionned it in his popular weblog.
I like the idea of tags, or folksonomy in general. But at the same time, I have a feeling that this is "just a little bit better" than single or simple categorization, or taxonomy. Now I must say I have not pushed studies in this area very far. I know very few official terms and accepted concepts in this area. Also, like many, I have been thinking about it for some time, and even created a framework a while back at Macadamian that innocently implemented some kind of folksonomy.
But I am still in doubt. Take the post from the author of the Tags macro that lead me to write this text. The author decided to assign a few tags to it: folksonomy, innovation, organization, trac, wiki. These are the tags HE thought would be the most appropriate. But for others, they may not be of much value. The way I read his article may lead to completely different tags in my mind. I may be attracted more to the usage of Cocoon and Jelly, or city architectures, or by Jon Udell interests, or anything else in this article that the author did not think was important enough to deserve a tag -- tag that may not even exist in his system.
To the limit, tags should cover every idea expressed in the post. Therefore, every piece of information in the post deserve a tag. Why then even bother tagging it? Content is the tag.
Tags somehow remind me of HTML META keywords. People abused them, underused them, misused them, to a point where search engines do not rely on them anymore. Tags, or Folksonomy, may be useful to individuals, but I do not think they are useful socially, unless just a few people manage them, a few people such as librarians. Consistency in how things are tagged is important. There are only a few individuals that organize books in a library, if not a single person. This ensures that visitors become familiar with the way things are organized at a specific place. If you let all customers decide on ways to tag things, you end up in chaos and the "system" is not a system anymore.
This tells me that random searches ala Google are the best way to find things socially, and even individually for people like me that have a hard time selecting tags for every piece of information they receive and keep (my inbox contains currently 2613 untagged emails and I rely on searches to find stuff. Some people would lose sleep over this. I sleep well.) Tags and categories are useful when you know more or less precisely what you are looking for. But they may hide the unexpected; the item that you were looking for in a context you did not even know existed before.
Update: Here is an example. I had to check if I should write "lose sleep", or "loose sleep". I am always unsure about this one. I searched google for "lose sleep over it" (found 11,400) and "loose sleep over it" (found 2,060). It took 10 seconds. I may be wrong but I trust the 11,400 people who wrote "lose" (Google being so nice even asked me if I meant "lose" in the "loose" search). How much time would I have spent if I had to think of tags or categories to find this information? I think I'd still be looking.
