Newsweek Talks Tagging - Gary Price Responds
April 11th, 2005Gary Price responds (quite elegantly, I may add) to an article that appeared in Newsweek about open tagging systems. The author of the article called librarians “greybeards” (an undeserved cheapshot) and was a bit misinformed on the way librarians classify books. Gary sets him straight.
Gary also says something that I wholeheartedly agree with:
“I think it’s time to end comparing everything to the Dewey Decimal System. Many libraries (school and public) use Dewey but many others don’t. Another classification scheme called Library of Congress Classification (LCC) is used in many large libraries around the world.”
Why not stop comparing tagging to LCC as well. Folksonomies is, IMO, not just about classifying or cataloguing. That is a very small part of a much larger focus of del.icio.us as a collective intelligence and pesonalized bookmarking tool. Joshua Schachter said something similar in a recent interview:
“Tags are creating more than straightforward classifications of Web documents or links, said Joshua Schachter, the creator of del.icio.us. One of the most popular tags created on the bookmarking service is ‘to_read,’ a tag attached to links of pages users want to remember to read. ‘There is a behavior around tags that has nothing to do with categorization,’ Schachter said.”