Actually ...
Though it wasn't through a del.icio.us tag that I chanced upon Rashmi Sinha (and
frankly, I should have known about her well before "chancing" upon her),
various tag searches on del.icio.us did lead me to pages by her, along with other
interesting materials.
A search for tagging+cognition,
for instance, brought me to the recently posted Beneath
the Metadata - Some Philosophical Problems with Folksonomy. I read quite a
number of blogs by librarians, and most of these are very enthusiastic toward
tagging (and everything Web 2.0). So it was interesting to encounter a perspective
that was quite a bit more hesitant about adopting non-professional classification
methods:
There are no right or wrong classification terms in a folksonomic world, and the system can break down when applied to databases of journal articles or dissertations. Folksonomists are confusing cataloging structure with personal opinions and subsequent social bookmarking. These are not the same thing, and they need to be separated.
And if that's not clear enough, the concluding sentences tell us:
Folksonomy is a scheme based on philosophical relativism, and therefore it will always include the failings of relativism. A traditional classification scheme will consistently provide better results to information seekers.
But that sort of leaves out all the fun. And remember, I found the article because
it was tagged.
Go to: Automatic tagging?, or
Go to: Whether we're for or against, or
Go to: But you can, you can!