Survival of the Fittest Tag and Tag Gardening

I really enjoyed Alexis Wichowski's unique take on social tagging. I'm a big fan of the evolutionary perspective and often apply it to my own life so I was excited to see it being employed within the social networking world. Wichowski's premise is that social tagging supports the survival of "long tail" items that might not otherwise be discovered by Internet users. I also liked the article's suggestion that participating in the creation and use of folksonomies actually mirrors more closely the reality of human cognition. It is impossible to fight the evolution of folksonomies, instead, information professionals can help it by providing controlled vocabulary recommendations and guidelines for tagging.

Isabella Peters's and Katrin Weller's research on Tag Gardening further explores the ways in which librarians and other information professionals can support the organization of folksonomies. They used gardening metaphors to describe ways in which folksonomies can become less messy and more productive, without the loss of the open tagging atmosphere that makes them so flexible. One of the methods they are exploring is the development of TagCare, a platform that aggregates all of a users tags from a variety of different social tagging sites, including Del.icio.us. Users are then able to organize their own personal tag language and "weed" out any anomalies. TagCare will also alert users if they ever try to tag something that does not fit with their personomy. It's a pretty neat concept, though I think it would be more useful for highly engaged taggers than a casual tagger, like myself.