Lee Iverson

One of my main hopes for this stuff is that we are on our way towards allowing individuals to create contextualized information structures and then create systems that can mine these in social environments for community formation, grounded community ontological modelling, etc. In this context, as I see it, it is fundamentally important to allow and encourage individualized and potentially idiosyncratic tagging (or categorization) behaviour.

In that light, I was criticizing del.icio.us' "Recommended Tags" feature for its seeming push towards harmonization or homogenization of tagging behaviour. I was concerned that "recommending" tags based on how others had tagged an item would actively encourage decontextualization of the tagging activity.

Well, I was wrong. The "Recommended Tags" are derived from an intersection of tags others have used and your own tagset. In other words, you are encouraged to reuse your own tags when those have already been used to identify the resource by others. This seems to be much more about simply recognizing a natural concordance of your tagging choices with those of others. In other words, exactly the kind of "mining" of the social environment that I advocate. Mea culpa. Sorry for badmouthing you inappropriately Josh.

Technorati Tags: folksonomy, tagcamp, del.icio.us, tagging.