Following my post yesterday on del.icio.us and my comment thereto on the shortcomings of its tagging system, I came across an article on the Next generation of open tagging systems on Library Stuff via Catalogablog. It reports on a service called Wists which uses “themes” and dodgy underscoring to get round the problems I mentioned in my comment: lack of fields and inability to use multi-word terms in del.icio.us. Sounds good, though I confess I haven’t played with it yet. As I see it though, the question is not, Could this be the ‘middle of the road’ that will make librarians (more structured in their classifications) and open tagging zealots satisfied?
but Can we all be arsed to change our bookmarking system every time someone else improves it?
On a related note, I can’t describe how much I hate the word Folksonomy. I don’t know why.