Tagging vs. Cataloging

An interesting post by Chiara Fox, a senior information architect on tagging vs. cataloging.

Tagging differs from traditional cataloging in a number of ways. First, tagging no longer belongs solely to the world of librarians and indexers: now anyone can tag and describe assets. And not only is it possible for any user to apply a tag, but in some systems (such as Flickr), users can even add tags to other peoples’ assets.

It’s nothing groundbreaking new, but a good summary of folksonomies vs taxonomies. My favourite quote:

tagging has brought metadata to the masses

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