Tagging: users customizing the web

I am a bit overwhelmed, but admiring, of all the possibilities that tagging and folksonomies open up. As Mathes points out, without tagging, metadata only encompasses the author or professional's definition of 'what something is about'. Tagging allows users to do this and share their definitions with others. Really, shouldn't users be able to decide what something is about? The 'official' metadata attached to a link may have little personal value a user. In an online environment where we have grown accustomed to customizing everything - from the colours of our email interface, the Firefox toolbars we want to see, the appearance of our homepage, the creation of 'my store' at sites like Amazon.ca - it does seem to be the next logical step that we customize the entire content of the web to make the information more meaningful, useful, and convenient to each of us. Porter points out that tagging, sb and folksonomies allows us to "speak the user's language" and make searching easier.

This personal classification of web content allows for collaboration in information gathering and easy sharing of relevant sites of interest. Why is this a "social software" and not just a personal customization? As Sinha states, this allows for like-minded individuals to share their findings and their tags. This makes the communication of collaborative research efforts much easier. Our tagging of sites with the 'LIS 757' tag is a great example. We are able to share articles, comment on articles, maintain lists of links very easily. Otherwise...we would be sending millions of emails with "Hey check this out!" note (or really, further in the past...passing out a printed bibliography or memos of useful resources that would need to be located all over again). I think that it provides a way to communicate and organize findings in a manner that is convenient and useful to both the finder and the others in their research group.

Beyond groups that are explicitly linked together, tagging allows for researchers to find other like-minded individuals and follow their findings as well.

What I like about distributed research via tagging & bookmarking:

• ease of access to the information tagged (a simple click takes you there)
• the ability to create a collaborative group 'bibliography' with various tags that represent various perspectives/subject divisions
• the ability to share these findings within a larger community (imagine some LIS student writing a paper on social software in public libraries...what a jackpot if she discovers the 'LIS 757' del.icio.us tag!).
• moving beyond an author's or professional's interpretation of their work and providing more relevant references. I think this is very striking if you think of, for example, a media student tagging links: what the item is "about" (i.e. George Bush commenting on Iraq on location at some ranch) may have very little to do with why the media student is interested in it, tagging allows for a very focussed classification (i.e. media images of the 'modern cowboy').
• great for new and current topics which may have not been well categorized or identified in mainstream circles yet - this may be especially relevant for new technologies.
  

What I don't like about it:

• tagging is so easy that its seems that only slightly relevant items are often tagged
• when not used well, or with no additional tagging, commenting, or organization - it feels a bit like a pile of articles dropped on your desk with no explanation of why they are there.
  

I definitely need to start making better use of tagging - it is still not a regular habit for me when researching, despite the fact that I do much of my researching online. Like wikis, I wish that I had been more familiar with this technology and its potential educational uses earlier in my FIMS career! *Sigh!*