Usability Views Article Details  home | timeline | recent | popular | e-reports | userati | books | about  Crossing Boundaries: 2005 IA Summit Wrapup: Overview and Pre-Sessions (29 Apr 2005) The contentious attitude of many of the boosters and detractors of folksonomies distracted from the fact that a truly new categorization method rose out of engineering communtiy rather than the IA community that spends every waking hour thinking about organization systems. Nevertheless, the IAs named it (natch) and at the moment they look to be the ones who will figure out how to take the best of the world of tagging and world of controlled vocabularies to make an even more powerful system. After an energetic boostering of folksonomies by Thomas Vanderwal, and a razor-sharp dissection of their weakness by Peter Morville, Peter Merholtz—who has been known in the past to take extreme positions with much handwaving—offered up a wonderfully balanced perspective on the nature of the folksonomy that pointed to a best-of-both worlds solution of blending strength. He also waxed poetic as he appreciated moments of beauty in collaborative classification choices, epitomized by the Flickr categories “color” and “me.” I have hopes for the future of folksonomies, with champions like these. Article URL: http://www.boxesandarrows.com/archives/crossing_boundaries_2005_ia_summit_wrapup_overview_and_pre-sessions.php Read 200 more articles from Boxes and Arrows sorted by date, popularity, or title. Next Article: Generating Unforgeable Evidence for Secure Communications     This site is a labour of love built by Chris McEvoy