In addition to providing cheap metadata, tagging seemed to democratize the process
of classification. It took classification away from central authorities (such as librarians
and information architects) and gave it back to the people.
Information architect Lou Rosenfeld noticed that tagging isn??™t all that good at the
things information architecture is supposed to do. It doesn??™t, for example, ???support
searching and other types of browsing nearly as well as??¦controlled vocabularies
applied by professionals.??? Others, such as social software guru Clay Shirky, argued
that tagging is more cost-effective and less prone to bureaucratic biases than centrally
controlled classification systems.
Four Tension PoinTs
This friction led to a number of interesting and occasionally heated debates between
proponents of different disciplines (discussed in more depth in Chapter 4).
On the surface these debates suggest that there is a fundamental disagreement over
what tagging is and what it??™s good for.
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