#8 Folky

For some reason, it took me a while to get my head around folksonomies last year in library school. Taxa's, controlled vocabs, etc etc, made heaps of sense, as they were enmeshed in rules and structure. Maybe the inner control freak I have trouble silencing (mentioned a few posts back) was screaming so much it generated enough white noise to cancel out any chances of understanding folksonomies. Now that I understand it's just tagging, I'm, well, yeah... that makes sense. That's the problem with jargonism - that is, applying new words to a more understandable colloquial tongue - it will inevitably have a significant buffer period before people realise what it's synonymous with.

I'm a bit skeptical of tagging in many respects, though that often falls back on how arbitrarily I tend to tag things (see: this blog). But cataloging's an intrinsically subjective art, and as much as we have LCSH, MARC, AACR2, etc to keep us in line, there will still be plenty of times when subject headings have to be created to accomodate for a certain location, new field, etc, and dewey is constantly being rejigged, so a few different points of entry to any one subject area is pretty much a given. And, as a couple of the articles pointed out, once you find someone's personal taxa and vocab that alligns with yours - bonus. Less time spent trying to guess how the cataloguer (or LC) would approach it. You're constantly breaking rules with any controlled vocab anyway. As a colourfully disgusting example, an australian tourism guide controlled vocab from an annoyingly recent (still over 10 or so years, but still...) period of time listed 'homosexuality.. see: sexual perversion'.