Are folksonomies scalable?

If you take a look at my delicious tagging structure, you will see I don't really have one. I'm not very sharesy with my bookmarks...they could be more social, but I'm lazy. Hell, I can hardly remember what I bookmarked them myself. Sometimes I change the way I tag with my mood. It's not intentional. When I go back to find anything, I just encounter a terrible mess.

I sat down this evening to catch up on reading my 'toread' tagged articles (got through about 100) and just felt overwhelmed. It was as if this evolutionary folksonomic tagging system just made my life more difficult and things harder to find...mostly because of the sheer ease of it. Just like with digital photography allowing me to take hundreds of crappy photos as easily as a couple of good ones, I'm able to bookmark like a madwoman, passing it by for the moment to let it amass to the point the noise overwhelms the usefulness.

What's a girl to do?

Lucky for me, one of my favourite academics came to my rescue. Emanuele Quintarelli, who I've linked to many times for his amazing paper on Folksonomies, pinged me earlier about a conversation he and David Weinberger (another fave of mine) are having on cleaning up the mess we're getting ourselves in with folksonomies. Hell, it's an amazing, wonderful, utopic ideal that you and I would organize ourselves beautifully with these degenerate things called tags and the world could record history through the rise and fall of common threads...but in the meantime, and as Emanuele says, people will stop using tags altogether if they lose their immediate usefulness.

So...what to do? What to do?

Emanuele makes some amazing suggestions in his article, including: Faceting tags, creating tag hierarchies and letting the people decide once more, by wikifying tag structuring. These are nice and simple solutions. I am intrigued by the wiki approach to facets and hierarchies. It keeps the next level within a folksonomic framework. Hmmmm...

The only thing I'm concerned about is that it will continue to be the web geeks that use this, and, thus, continue to skew the results to our experience. The general public still doesn't widely use or understand tags (try explaining to a non-geek why one would tag stuff...you'll see). They are still pretty deep geek, although growing, thanks to really simple implementations of tags and tagging incentives (I think that Technorati has brought us a long way with the use of microformats for their tag search).

Maybe, as well as thinking about how to manage tagging as it scales, we should also be considering how we can more easily spread the phenomenon of tagging?

technorati tags: folksonomy, folksonomies, tags, tagging, facetedtags, emanuelequintarelli, davidweinberger,