According to David Weinberger, Technorati is about to add a folksonomy tuning feature that shows related tags, making closely related content more findable. This is the kind of thing we need to make folksonomies be useful as more than just fun toys.
Mix in a faceted results tuner like fac.etio.us and you’ve got something really cool.
With some reluctance, I have added “folksonomy” as a sub-category in my site themes. I’m doing this specifically because Technorati will now pick up these posts as having been “tagged” with “folksonomy.” Frankly, I’m not sure this is a great idea. It encourages the proliferation of categories, which is not necessarily useful to the readers. But I’m curious to see what it does for traffic and cross-pollination, so I’m giving it a try.
Commenting on a recent post, Beth Harris asks the question of how the tagging system in Flickr could be used for teaching purposes. (Beth, a fellow SUNY-ite working at FIT, is doing some cool stuff with her art history classes using Flickr.) After thinking about it for a bit, I’m afraid the answer I come up with is “Not much; at least, not in its current form.”
Given the huge buzz about folksonomies now, (which I have previously called distributed categorization), this is a disappointing discovery.
What gives?
Here’s my own take it: (more…)
