I think it's clever! (The title)

Funny, I spent four hours on a flight a few days ago killing myself trying to figure out the right way to get my peanut butter (rich semantic networks) and my chocolate (simple tagging) together. I'll check out your references, though I'm guessing they're focused around multi-user setups, or (worse) institutional setups that strive for objectivity, rather than personal systems which can afford to be idiosyncratic.

(I know I should study what better minds have done first, but I have too much ego invested ... if I end up in a cult led by Ted Nelson developing an interactive n-dimensional hypertext client, call my parents, ok?)

Not only we were clever, we already got copycats!

Look for "Tagging, communities, vocabulary, evolution" at CSCW:

http://www.cscw2006.org/program_technical_tue.html

This is awesome. For over a year I've been scratching my head and slogging my way through figuring out tags. That was work enough, but then to try to explain it to other people who don't speak any kind of Internet or geek has REALLY been a challenge. All of you have really boiled this down and isolated it well and I really, really appreciate it because now I can start to articulate it as well -- something I really need to be doing in the next couple of months.

I also named your blog on my top 5 blogs not like my own for World Blog Day...

I have actually decided to study tagging for my dissertation. I have put in for an NSF grant, and hopefully it will come through (won't know until next year). So its great to see your paper and I will certainly be making contributions to this arena in the near-future :)

Ha, that actually is an awesome title, especially since it doesn't have a colon.

wow. i absolutely LOVE the title, so creative. and i didn't know tagging could be so academic. rawks.

I've quickly read the paper, and it looks excellent--I am looking forward to give it a careful read.

It's great to see your analysis in Section 4 (Taxonomy of Tagging Systems). To 4.1, I'd comment that the "object" aspect of what's being tagged is dependent on additional taxonomies, that may be interesting to include in this kind of study.

For example, with Flickr, the image isn't actually the "object" being tagged. What's tagged is one or more web pages that, in the context of Flickr's navigation and/or conceptual taxonomies, as represented through visual and information design on a series of web pages, represents an intersection between an image, a user, and, in some cases, a "set".

So, I wonder in what ways the sense that one "tags images" in Flickr is influenced by things like cultural and/or technical familiarity with any or all of website navigation, web page layout, and social network system taxonomies. (And, anecdotally, the non-techies I know who have used Flickr, don't get tags in Flickr, at least not on their own.)

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(Also, in the intro, you indicate that a "folksonomy" is a kind of "folk taxonomy". I think a "folk taxonomy" is, technically, something very different than a folksonomy. . .)