I'm not going to be too lengthy tonight, but I want to get in a thought on Elaine Peterson's essay "Beneath the Metadata: Some Philosophical Problems with Folksonomy" and the subsequent reactions.

Peterson's piece, as can is clear from the title, takes a stand against folksonomy as an effective organizational system. David Weinberger and Thomas Vander Wal both respond to the merits of this alternative system more effectively than I ever could, but I think there is one point that seems to be avoided in the discussion of its value. Critical to the importance of folksonomies is their operability on both the local and global levels: tagging for personal reference contributes to a global referential framework. Items will be sorted as it is useful for personal use at the same time as an individual's organization interacts with that of other individuals creating an emergent, global effect.

This is all well and good if the participants keep to themselves and tag purely on the basis of personal use, but in the types of folksonomies that we see popping-up, this is certainly not what happens - and this is where Peterson slips into the confusion between social-bookmaring and folksonomy. In social-bookmarking, the effect of feedback within the emergent system plays a more central role than it might in a blind folksonomy. Two examples of influential feedback iIn del.icio.us: users are prompted to use common tags when posting something that has already been tagged; and when a user discovers new links through his or her network or through a global aggregation. Effects like these diminish the purity of the folksonomy to be sure and move it away from the solution that Vander Wal suggests - that of a taxonomist taking cues from a (presumably blind) folksonomy. Instead of the Vander Wal solution, the global effect has an increased role as this central arbiter.

Over all, I fall on the side that folksonomies are indeed useful as an organizational tool, but, as I'm sure David and Thomas would both agree, they are certainly not a cure-all for the archive fever that has taken us.