After seeing this article linked off of slashdot, I read through it with great interest. I’m a late-comer to using del.icio.us, and soon I will be using Flickr (once I have my new server setup), the ease with which del.icio.us lets me add a link and categorize it is extremely nice. I can certainly see the appeal of it all. One of the key issues of course is going to be aliases, how do we tell a system like Flickr that these two words actually refer to the same topic and relate them together?
One of my roles in the recent past has been working at the UofA library as a Web developer. This afforded me a look into a world I had taken advantage of but never fully explored. How are books and articles categorized, what is their taxonomy? The advantage of this is that there is a controlled vocabulary for categorizing things, this is a universal vocabulary that anyone can use as well as take advantage of. But this tends to break down on a personal level, what I would categorize as social, others would put into political, but this is how I remember it and think about it, not how they do. Also, I tend to think in terms of things as broad concepts or I have a particular use in mind for my research, so I’m able to categorize it that way so I can remember it more easily.
So, where does the answer lie? Somewhere in-between I think, if there were some way to suggest a regular vocabulary word instead of the word that I am attempting to use it might start to instill the use of a controlled vocabulary, but it shouldn’t force me to use this taxonomy if I don’t wish to.
