I’ve pointed several times to the You’re It! blog because there is a lot of useful information to be found there about tagging in a context that is much broader than the library world. (In fact, I have yet to see or recall any mention of libraries so far in what has been written there.)
Today there is another interesting post, this time, containing notes on a presentation given by Rashmi Sinha entitled "Sorting, Tagging and Social Information Architecture or The Missing Chapter in the Polar Bear Book." I highly recommend that library folks who might be interested in tagging vis-à-vis cataloging take a look and digest some of the points contained in this report. Sinha compares tagging to taxonomy (akin to library cataloging).
Just one of the many interesting things mentioned was the following table comparing the two:
| Sorting | Tagging |
|---|---|
| higher cognitive cost | lower |
| richer data | less rich data |
| harder to aggregate socially | easy to aggregate socially |
The author also describes the ways in which Sinha describes tagging as useful, and includes a statement — made by himself or by Sinha, I’m not sure — to the effect that "Categorization is going to make a comeback."
That comment was by Sinha. My own asides are contained within square brackets. The rest is all paraphrase or approximate quotations jotted down during the talk. Thanks for the link!
Xian, thanks for the comment! And thanks for posting your notes, which (obviously) I found informative.