Folksonomies and the Rise of Tagging

Tagging—individuals using keywords of their own choosing to classify objects online,
including photos, bookmarks, products, and blog posts—is common with Web 2.0-
style sites. These folksonomies (a neologism derived from “folks” and “taxonomy”) provide
a number of benefits:
Hierarchies by definition are top-down and typically defined in a centralized
fashion, which is an impractical model poorly suited to the collaborative,
decentralized, highly networked world of Web 2.0.
Rich media, such as audio and video, benefit from this explicit metadata because
other forms of extracting meaning and searching is still a challenge.
Tags facilitate second-order effects by virtue of the aggregate, collective
intelligence that can be mined from the data set (enough to overcome differences
in individual tag choices for identical items).
Issues & Debates
Walled gardens 2.0. In Web 1.0, America Online (AOL) exemplified the
walled garden: users were welcome to create content and community as long
as it occurred within the walls of AOL. Arguably, there are now Web 2.0
walled gardens, such as MySpace and LinkedIn, which have vibrant, but—in
many ways—closed communities.
Privacy and liability for individuals. People are revealing increasingly more
details about themselves online, including likes, dislikes, opinions, personal
history, relationships, purchasing history, work history, dating history, and
so on. Therefore, it is increasingly being mined by other people, including
employers performing background checks, singles investigating upcoming
dates, government agencies mining social networking sites,36 and tax assessors
using homeowners’ online comments about remodeling upgrades to increase
property taxes.37
Privacy and liability for providers. Not being sufficiently sensitive to privacy
issues can result in legal and public relations disasters. Facebook suffered
some high-profile PR fallout when it underestimated the privacy implications
of new features deployed in September 2006. Within days, it was
forced to retract statements it had made and change service behavior.38 Or,
consider the $1 million fine issued to Xanga by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission
for violating the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA).
Xanga allowed children who identified themselves as under 13 years old
to sign-up for accounts, even though the stated policy forbid providing
accounts to that age group.39
Quality, not just quantity, matters. All users are not created equal nor are
their contributions. The most successful Web 2.0 companies have instituted
mechanisms to encourage and reward their most valuable members.