Can Tagging Create a Noospheric Taxonomy?

David Weinberger gave a speech at the Harvard Blogging conference last week about tagging and taxonomies.

Weinberger eloquently described the dilemma of losing meaning during the quantization process by explaining how the Dewey Decimal Classification system's religion category gives 88 full numbers to Christianity and only one number each to Judaism and Islam -- a disproportionate number of slots were given to one religion over these others due to a cultural bias and a finite number of available categories.

Will this new capability of tagging provide additional order to noetic chaos of the blogosphere?

I think that it'll certainly help connect like-minded people who are tech savvy enough to figure tagging out -- I'm not sure I've got it to fully work yet and Jay Rosen doesn't think so either:

"I don't understand tags yet but I am supposed to put a webcred in."

Of all of the messages that I've tagged with the "Webcred" tag, none of them have yet to show up on the Technorati Aggregator Page -- and Rosen's tagged message didn't show up either.

But the quantization loss of meaning and the lack of normalization standards for these tagging key words will limit the usefulness of tags -- people either won't categorize or they'll miscategorize their posts.

If a normalized key word standard is widely accepted & implemented, then tags could start serving the same purpose of academic key words for scholarly databases.

Then again people used to embed "metatag" key words within the HTML source code because it helped give people better search engine visibility, but then Google came along with a different ranking system and eliminated the need for this.

Next up -- Taxonomies for Open Source Journalism & Decentralized Labor