I was slightly on the wrong track in a previous blog, I think. It happens …
So, the mistake was that I was thinking that all of the popular tags that had survived in a historical context, could be thought of as “category labels” and the less popular ones were the highly individual ones. This would certainly have made things easy. Of course it is good that this is not the case, because that would have been TOO easy. And things that are easy, are not interesting. So why is it not true? Just look at the table below, which shows the top four most popular tags for some of the 50 most popular sites on delicious:

It is self evident that the popular tags form a heterogeneous collection. Some are clear category labels that would feel at home in a formal taxonomy (e.g. “News”, “Movies”, “Music”). Some, like “Daily” and “Recommendation” appear to describe resources with a particular property which is nevertheless fixed and user independent. Others like “Fun” and “Geek” describe more personal properties that depend on individual interpretation. Finally there are proper names like “UK” and “NYC”.

So, what are the facts telling us???

technorati tags: ontology, folksonomy