From Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tags):
"Tags are pieces of information separate from, but related to, an object. In the practice of collaborative categorization using freely chosen keywords, tags are descriptors that individuals assign to objects."
Tagging is really useful for collaborative categorizing of unstructured sets of items such as images (as shown on Flickr). However, in the case of books the system is already quite well-structured -- all books have unique identifiers (ISBNs) and each book belongs to one or more pre-defined (the Dewey classification system), so it will be really interesting to see if "anarchistic tagging" can bring some gains to an area previously dominated by "expert classification" (the Dewey system). Compare with the case of Wikipedia ("collaborative and anarchistic") v.s. Encyclopædia Britannica ("expert and controlled").
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From Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tags): "Tags are pieces of information separate from, but related to, an object. In the practice of collaborative categorization using freely chosen keywords, tags are descriptors that individuals assign to objects."
Tagging is really useful for collaborative categorizing of unstructured sets of items such as images (as shown on Flickr). However, in the case of books the system is already quite well-structured -- all books have unique identifiers (ISBNs) and each book belongs to one or more pre-defined (the Dewey classification system), so it will be really interesting to see if "anarchistic tagging" can bring some gains to an area previously dominated by "expert classification" (the Dewey system). Compare with the case of Wikipedia ("collaborative and anarchistic") v.s. Encyclopædia Britannica ("expert and controlled").