Via Roy Tennant‘s Current Cites, the latest edition of the Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science and Technology special section on folksonomies:

This special section of four articles plus a substantive introduction by the guest editor focus on user tagging and what has been called “folksonomies” — or user-created taxonomies. The articles are an interesting mix of simple explanations of why users tag, tag usage in Flickr, and others that seek to explain various tagging systems and how they may or may not be useful in retrieval.

We’ve been talking a bit about tagging and folksonomies in my Technologies and the Future of Writing module, and students have been slow to see the reason for tagging and the comprehending just what folksonomies are, and to be honest I have often found myself at a loss for explaining it to them. I’ve yet to read the articles included in this special edition, but I’m hoping that they—and especially the guest editors’ introduction—will help us gain a better understand the implications that folksonomies can have on classification systems and writing technologies.