This week we are continuing our discussion about social tagging. We read two very interesting articles that pertained to this topic. As I said before I really have very little knowledge about social tagging, is that good or bad, I am still not sure! After reading these articles and exploring CiteULike, Library Thing and Flickr, I feel I have a better understanding of social tagging. I also explored http://delicous.com a bit and found that very interesting. After talking to one of our reference librarians, I discovered our library has used these cites for sometime.
After looking at these websites and reading the articles, one point that keeps reemerging is folksonomies must be useful and findable. With no set guidelines for social tagging, the user must use his or her own judgement to create these tags. The popularity of tag clouds seem to make the entire process easier especially for a newbie to social tagging such as myself.
Comparing folksonomy tags to "gardening activities" and breaking the process down step by step makes the entire process a bit easier to understand for me.
One of the concluding remarks in the article by Wichowski states "folksonomies may be flawed, but they are at present, the best means known to track what is happening with the non-mainstream of the information environment". I think this is so true. Folksonomies certainly will evolve, however they are a great tool to use in social networking at the present time.
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