Debate about tagging

Is Tagging A Disruptive Innovation? - Joel Lamantia asks that question at Tagsonomy.com (July 21, 2007. The spread of tagging could distract from creating or maintaining taxonomies and possibly in use of metadata. But there could also be a large element of hype in the attention tagging is getting. This is one piece of a longer discussion. Lamnatia concludes "Though it’s been a few years since tagging became visible, it seems too early to understand what kind of changes - if any - will occur in the metadata management ecosystem as a result of tagging’s emergence."

One wonders if people really want to spend the extra few seconds to tag an item, and if they do tag to use something more useful than "read later". I suspect that tagging will remain personal, and that general access will depend on automatic categorization based on business rules.

Social search and taxonomies

What will be the impact on the use of taxonomies in companies as more adopt enterprise 2.0 ways of connecting people? Social search, social networking, social enterprise - these are new possibilities being adapted for enterprise use from the consumer universe of Facebook / MySpace, del.ico.us and other social bookmarking services, Digg and Flickr and all the places where people tag what they find. Ajay Gandhi at BEA Systems in a KMWorld webinar posits that social search tools will greatly enrich knowledge management by assisting in sharing knowledge and forming communities. Harvesting Enterprise Wisdom through Social Search reviews knowledge management archetypes, notes the rising state of information overload, and describes the ways social tools will help people cope with that load. It does not mean the end of formal taxonomies to support intranet navigation and repository search, but it will see the emergence of folksonomies based on how people tag and social networks developed according to interest and expertise.

Webinar will be available for 90 days at www.kmworld.com/webinars/bea/21aug2007

Facets and Taxonomies

The Taxonomy Community of Practice (Earley and Associates) is running a session on Facets and Taxonomies Search online on August 29, 1pm to 2pm EDT. Price $50 US.

From the announcement: "We'll start with an overview of facets and faceted search and then hear from Peter Bell, one of the founders of Endeca, a faceted search company, about new developments in the field that allow a combination of unstructured and structured tagging and classification. "