Flickr and del.icio.us tags illustrate why worse is better
Recently the term 'folksonomy' has been coined to refer to the use of unstructured keywords to classify and group resources collaboratively ('resources' as in photos on Flickr and links to web sites on del.icio.us). Supposedly the experts on metadata are chagrined to discover that structured keywords, hierarchical taxonomies, and faceted metadata have been outdone by such a simple system. But this approach isn't actually all that new. Read more