Folksonomy Schmolksonomy

"The tagging battles rage on, with a slew of posts by Clay Shirky provoking an unusually active discussion among the Many-to-Many blog readership. As a card-carrying acolyte of knowledge management who is deeply skeptical about current efforts to create a semantic web, I feel like I can sympathize with those on both sides of the debate.

On the one hand, Clay has a point. After years of effort by slews of brainy individuals, the semantic web is going nowhere. Then one day someone strikes upon the right balance of usability and utility to create a tagging system that is both simple enough for people actually to use and robust enough to be of value to a community of users, not just the one doing the tagging. The new Techorati Tags feature drives home the point raised by the brilliant-in-their-simplicity tagging systems used by del.icio.us and Flikr, showing how cool it is to unify them with each other and with blog tags (which have been around for a while in a non-folksonomy manifestion)."

A good discussion ...