• http://www.dlib.org/dlib/january06/guy/01guy.html

D-Lib Magazine, sponsored by the Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI), just came out with their January issue. It includes a thoughtful commentary  by Marieke Guy and Emma Tonkin about Foksonomies: Tidying up Tags? Guy and Tonkin report about their brief analysis of tags in flickr and del.icio.us and conclude that "only ten to fifteen percent" of tags are single-use tags; they describe "a single, fairly stable, shared ontology" developing and analogize it to a creole language developing from a pidgin language. Their conclusion:

There is a real danger that by tidying up tags we are condoning the implementation of a destructive solution that may lose valuable metadata. The two questions we need to ask ourselves may be: Even assuming that such a consensus were possible, do we really want a world where everyone speaks a collaboratively defined analogue to the Queen's English? To what extent, in this instance, with a fantastically complex and valuable database of user contributions from all over the world, is it possible to separate the metaphorical baby from the bathwater?