The Sect of Rama

Flickr is rolling out a new feature called "machine tags" that allows users to be more precise in how they tag, and how they search, their photos. Cool stuff, I'm glad Flickr is supporting a "deeper" way of associating data to images other than just keywords. But it too comes back to the folksonomy vs taxonomy problem:

# Are machine tag namespaces reserved?

No. Anyone can use a namespace for anything they want.

If you are concerned about colliding namespaces you should consider adding an additional machine tag to define your namespace. For example :

dc:subject=tags
xmlns:dc=http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/

Like tags, in general, we expect (hope?) that the community will develop its own standards by consensus over time.

Folksonomy "standards" is an oxymoron, so is this really just a fancy way of trying to put structure around chaos? Getting people to create metadata is difficult enough, let alone creating complex metadata. I'd much rather see Flickr adopt a "tag suggestions" feature, a type-ahead to offer tag choices based on their popularity. Its the low hanging fruit of the metadata clean-up problem- big pay off (cleaner tagging) *and* low effort.

Sigh. The more I play around with sites with tagging, the more curmudgeonly I get about enforcing cleaner data. :-/