Lorraine here, with a quick thought from the YALSA blogger meetup.  Some serious work on tagging and categorization is taking place at the YALSA blog and much of it is clearly needed – having standardized tags and categories make stuff findable (I assume that I need not elaborate further, o library-blog readers…)

However, Beth Gallaway brought up an excellent point via her twitter:  “If they [tags] are standardized it becomes a formal taxonomy … Which is the opposite of a folksonomy.”

And isn’t one of the great things about social media the folksonomy – a chance to see what comes out of the various minds on the internet, to allow people to search and categorize in all sorts of ways?  It doesn’t take up real estate to tag both “teen culture” and “emo” so why not?  Who know what connections can be made if we leave the field open?