The Hive Mind: Folksonomies and User-Based Tagging

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Ellyssa Kroski[Edit][Delete]: The Hive Mind: Folksonomies and User-Based Tagging, InfoTangle [Edit][Delete] January 12, 2006

Good introduction to the concepts of folksonomy and tagging, though if you are familiar with the topic you won't learn a lot that's new. Especially useful is the list of advantages and disadvantages of folksonomies. The author concludes, correctly, "The advantages to top-down hierarchical taxonomies for library collections are without question. For cataloging the Web, however, they just aren't feasible." A lot of people working on traditional (structured and formal) semantic web applications will learn this the hard way. More...