It appears that in the modern world of information overload, where selection of valuable data becomes a necessity, folksonomy seems to be the tool for screening. The idea of tags allocated by individuals, shared in a common social medium, in other words economising the links with appropriate titles, seems to benefit everyone engaged in the process.
Employing of taxonomy for creation and marketing of publication will eventually be a norm in the virtual world. In collection of research articles from the WWW for the purpose a publication can be economised by d.e.l.i.c.i.o.u.s or Google reader or any such RSS feed servers. You can categorise and keep all the relevant links through hypertext in one place – gathering into one page from all over the virtual world.
Many websites now provide the tag clouds to filter through their content. The Amazone example shows that sometimes it defeats the purpose of economising as same product is tagged over 395 times; it is more a crowd than taxonomy. But from a business point of view (irrespective personal views), the multi tags will link the product to different genre; thus providing more exposure to the product.
A good tag cloud should be the one leading to easy search and brings out the accent of ideas on the page. It should serve the purpose of easy manoeuvring beyond being an artistic mess. The example of MSNBC brings out the ideological emphasis seen through tags. In the example Edwards and Clinton seem to emphasise more on presidency, whereas Obama brings out woman and families. The creation of tag clouds of the past writings and present day writings can possibly bring out the ideological evolution of human history. Very interesting to see how folksonomy is leading to an unintended consequence of comparative analysis.
