More than a few people have asked me what the big deal is about tags, and one in particular routinely makes fun of my obsessive tagging habits. On Metafilter I found a great essay on tagging (or “folksonomy,” or “flat hierarchy”) and why it’s better than traditional forms of organization. This passage is particularly applicable to why I switched to tags on the site:
The signal loss in traditional categorization schemes comes from compressing things into a restricted number of categories. With tagging, when there is signal loss, it comes from people not having any commonality in talking about things. The loss is from the multiplicity of points of view, rather than from compression around a single point of view. But in a world where enough points of view are likely to provide some commonality, the aggregate signal loss falls with scale in tagging systems, while it grows with scale in systems with single points of view.
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