There have been several interesting and loosely related posts lately that have caught my eye. HorsePigCow has an entry asking why people tag. The explicit reason for tagging is the organization of material for personal convenience. I tag a photo on Flickr or a site on del.icio.us so I can access it later and have it grouped with similar items I've come across. Yet where tagging becomes more than simply an organizational tool is when we look at the social and emergent aspects. When we become aware of emergent tags, as in del.icio.us, a process of feedback begins. The tagger is suddenly aware of the larger implications of their individual action in relation to other individual action. It is not a stretch to assume that a tagger will be influenced, either positively or negatively, through awareness of emergent tags. Overall, this type of feedback will stabilize the emergent tags, or in extreme cases of imitation the folksonomy becomes more of a traditional taxonomy.

In addition to systemic feedback, the social aspect of tagging that we commonly see will effect the function of tags. In a social context tags organize not simply the items tagged but the taggers themselves. "Social_network" and "blog" are two of my most common del.icio.us tags. Because my tags, and their relative frequency, are displayed in a social context, these tags begin to operat not as tags of the specific pages, but as tags of me. People who visit my del.icio.us page will be able to learn a great deal about me, and the identity I project through my tags. When tagging I am certainly aware that I am doing this in a public situation, that others might try to navigate the information I have otherwise organized simply for myself. The tags, then have to function as self-tags.

A second post I found thought-provoking was Scott Karp's on his blog Publishing 2.0. Scott writes that with Web 2.0's focus on the participation and content-creation of audiences (produsers) we end up with sub-par results stemming from a less intelligent audience than certain old media audiences. To take this approach simplifies the purpose of these systems to a certain extent. Sure the top stories on Digg may not be the most interesting but they, ideally, reflect the network from which they grow. Instead of saying that The New York Times audience would inevitably create a more sophisticated user-created content page and that this implies an inherent failure of Web 2.0 systems, we should look for user-created content in networks that more accurately reflect our interests, what we consider interesting. It is not a problem of the structure but a problem with finding one you fit into.

This ties in with the purpose of tagging question in that we tag (a form of content creation) for different reasons in different contexts. In a fairly narrow network demographically, the drive to create content will be very different than it would be for the same people operating in a different network.