Folksonomies - think 'them' not 'us'

There's a fascinating debate going on between some of the big names in the blogosphere about the virtues of folksonomies and tagging.

Dave Winer, AKMA, and Dan Bricklin each make very interesting points about a possible problem with tagging - laziness and guilt. Bricklin explains -

"I think Dave has pointed out a key problem with tagging. It seems like a nice idea but it requires us to always do it.

I was buying into this line of reasoning until I read Clay Shirky's brilliant counter argument today -

"This is what’s missing in the "Users don’t tag their own blog posts!" hand wringing -- they’re not supposed to. Tagging is done by other people.

Excellent - Clay cuts through the clouded thinking like a laser - it's not (Dan's) us who has to do the tagging, it's (Clay's) them. I myself have always been lazy about categorizing my own blog posts but regularly spend much time thinking about how best to tag bookmarks (of blog posts, etc) when entering them in del.icio.us. If they're worth taking the time to bookmark they're worth bookmarking well.