You may have noticed a new line of metadata at the bottom of posts on if:book – Technorati tags. Technorati is perhaps the most dynamic blog-tracking site on the web, scanning over 10 million weblogs and ranking their authority according to the number of links they receive from around the blogosphere. Technorati tags are socially constructed classification terms – keywords or categories that authors apply to their entries so that they show up in Technorati searches. Taken together, these thousands of tags are what make up the Technorati folksonomy – a taxonomic system created by users from the bottom-up, instead of by an information architect (like a librarian) from the top-down. Folksonomies are less rigid than shelf-based hierarchies (see “the only group that can organize everything is everybody”). They can cope with subtle but crucial differences between synonyms like movies, films, flicks, and cinema – or devlish distinctions like art versus entertainment. Tags can help bloggers reach small niche areas of interest, trickling content down into the hard-to-reach corners. But being highly idiosyncratic, folksonomic tags tend to proliferate rapidly. Most are too obscure or particularly worded to become widely adopted points of reference. Right now, sites like Technorati or Flickr deal with this problem by ranking. The irony is that, for all the promise of personal expression through folksonomy, the tags that make it to the top of the pile tend to be pretty conventional. Less formal than a library catalogue, to be sure, but nothing terribly colorful (nuance fares better in personal bookmarking systems like del.icio.us). And again, we are struck with this problem, endemic on the web, of authority meaning simply who’s popular. In that regard, the web is still a lot like high school.
(Mechanics: we’re able to ping specific tags with the great Technorati Tag plugin for Movable Type)