Survival of the fittest tag: Folksonomies, findability, and the evolution of information organization
Alexis Wichowski
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This paper offered one possible interpretation of what folksonomies represent in the larger information environment. They are at once a radical new adaptation and the logical successor of Aristotle’s hierarchies. Tags’ imprecise, redundant, and personalized nature may be criticized as being difficult to find using today’s information retrieval mechanisms. Yet given the rate of technological change occurring now and the exponential change expected in the future (Kurzweil, 2001), today’s information retrieval mechanisms will likely become extinct before long as well, replaced by some new adaptation capable of meeting the challenge of folksonomies.
Wichowski