Here are my notes from "Folksonomy, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Mess," a conversation between Clay Shirky, Stewart "Flickr" Butterfield, Joshua "Delicious" Schachter and Jimmy "Wikipedia" Wales at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego. Folksonomy is the process of letting users generate and apply their own tags to shared items (such as blog-posts, encyclopedia entries, photos, links, lists or interests, or what have you) and then discovering which tegs users share with one another. Unlike previous ventures into this field, the tags aren't "controlled" -- any user can invent one and any user can apply them to anything, and yet it all works.
Click here for full transcript.
[via Boing Boing
Posted by actionhero at March 17, 2005 01:32 PM