While the discussion (apparently) for or vs folksonomies goes on, Clay Shirky on Many2Many article puts a point.

As a lot of us agree, probably we’re on a river where we aren’t allowed to chose a direction: we can only go on following the flow.
In front of economic reasons, a less accurate and professional classification is the only possibility we have:

She [Liza] thinks economic value is another of the characteristics to be traded off. I think economic value is the environment.

Put another way, I don’t think it matters what is lost by not having professionally produced metadata in any environment where that is not an option anyway, by virtue of being priced out of the realm of possibility…..

To put this metaphorically, we are not driving a car, with gas, brakes, reverse and a lot of choice as to route. We are steering a kayak, pushed rapidily and monotonically down a route determined by the enviroment

Anyway a reflection about the values of controlled vocabularies and folksonomies is absolutely needed:

I think Liz’s examination of the ways that folksonomies are inferior to other cataloging methods is vital, not because we’ll get to choose whether folksonomies spread, but because we might be able to affect how they spread, by identifying ways of improving them as we go.

In the same category:

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 13th, 2005 at 9:20 pm and is filed under Information Architecture, Clay Shirky, Many2Many. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.