Tagging or Folksonomy is becoming more popular.
Just as the internet allows users to create and share their own media, it is also enabling them to organize digital material their own way, rather than relying on pre-existing formats of classifying information. A December 2006 survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project has found that 28% of internet users have tagged or categorized content online such as photos, news stories or blog posts. On a typical day online, 7% of internet users say they tag or categorize online content.
Pew Internet and American life have published an interview with “David Weinberger Describes How Tagging Changes People’s Relationship to Information and Each Other” by Lee Rainie, Director, Pew Internet and American Life Project January 31, 2007
Apart from being useful Weinberger sees Tagging is an example of bottom-up building of categories instead of top-down imposition of categories. Folksonomies create patterns that reveal how the public is making sense of and using something, not just how expert cataloguers think the public ought to be thinking.Tagging is social. Tags are public and this means that by searching under a tag you can find websites others have discovered and considered good enough to bookmark. This allows groups to cluster around similar interests.
The full interview is in pdf file format is here .
