Brian Dear suggests “Taggle” as a future site that would let us type in a keyword and get back all the pages that use that word as a tag. And in the comments people suggest links to a whole bunch of interesting tag work.

I think I’ll do a long-overdue issue of my newsletter, Joho, on taxonomies vs. tags. All the cool kids are doing tags, you know. But I’m so wrapped up now in researching the Feb. issue of Esther Dyson’s newsletter, that I may not get to it. And what’s the topic of that Feb. issue? Taxonomies and tags! That’s also (roughly) the topic of the book I’m working on. As the saying goes, when all you have is a <entity type=”tool” field=”carpentry”>hammer</entity>, everything looks like a <entity type=”fastener” field=”carpentry” driver=”hammer”>nail</entity>.

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This chess game shows you what the computer is contemplating. Very cool. (Via Pito who also has some ruminations on folksonomies today.)

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I have an article on facts and values (using uBio as an example) up at Esther Dyson‘s re-done site. (Free registration is required.)

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Peter Merholz, AKA peterme, has an excellent article at Adaptive Path called Metadata for the Masses:

But what if we could somehow peek inside our users’ thought processes to figure out how they view the world? One way to do that is through ethnoclassification [1] — how people classify and categorize the world around them.

He takes del.icio.us and Flickr as examples of “ethnoclassification” (a phrase he tracks back to Susan Leigh Star),. (I am enamored of the branch of ethnoclassification on exhibit at del.icio.us if only because people have started calling it “folksonomy.”) He looks at the benefits. Then he addresses the problems, and suggests the paths out of the forest we’re making for ourselves.

Jay Fienberg points us also to Jon Udell’s article on “collaborative knowledge gardening.” I’ve also been looking at some related issues (e.g., here, here, here, here and here), but Peter has the advantage of knowing what he’s talking about.

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Glenn Fleishman, who you know from his work explaining wireless to the rest of us, has started a blog about, well, here’s what he says:

I’m launching this site in the interests of starting conversations about the way in which book details — author, title, subject, and even page count — are collected, sold, disseminated, updated, broken, and misused.

Take a look. It’s pretty damn interesting stuff.

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I’m looking for someone to talk with at the Library of Congress about its classification scheme. I’m interested in its history, how they modify it, its relationship to the Dewey system, and how the digitizing of information is affecting it. If you know someone there I could talk with about such stuff, would you please send me an email? (evident.com is the domain and self is the name.)

And a preemptive thanks to you all!

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