Am writing a paper on “folksonomies” as contrasted with vanilla ontologies for a databases class. Really, it’s a contrast between distributed classification vs professional annotation (which is, in turn, a microcosm of what’s happening thru the web at large–blogs vs newspapers, blah blah blah).
The paper is just a short thing, 5 pages. And for such a short paper, there’s way too much reading material available on the blogosphere–it seems this is an idea that’s spread like wildfire, due to the popularity of things like del.icio.us, flickr, and furl.
My working delicious feed for the paper (del has been very useful during the brainstorming/information-gathering process, as a way to keep track of all the links I’ve found, but given it’s recent flaky 503-ing nature, I just need to pray it doesn’t crash on me tonight).
Will be using this space to keep summaries of different pages I’ve read, and will eventually put up the paper.
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You may find the Clay Shirky piece and Peter Merholz Adaptive Path article and the associated PeterMe write-ups and relevant discussions in the comments quite helpful.