Several of the CCTE tagged del.icio.us links over the past few weeks led me to articles about social book-marking. (It didn’t take me long to realize the irony in using del.icio.us to learn about social bookmarking!) EDUCAUSE’s 7 Things You Should Know About… article lists social bookmarking as #7 on their list, and they give a good overview of what it is, how it works, who’s doing it, and what the current drawbacks and limitations are.

Of course, social bookmarking is just a subset of the larger phenomenon tagging. Tagging isn’t new, but it seems to have just recently crossed it’s tipping point. Just like del.icio.us users tag their bookmarks, Flickr users tag their photos, Gmail users tag their email, and bloggers tag their posts using the the rel-tag standard. All these people “tag” so they can either find info for themselves in the future, or make it easier for others to find this info.

When I was reading articles on tagging, I got a sense that people are aligning it with a social or collaborative way of organizing information. In these same articles the word folksonomy keeps popping up, and positioning itself across the room from taxonomy. If taxonomy is the traditional way of classifying information into hierarchical, tree-like structures, then folksonomy is classification by the common folks in non-hierarchical communities using tags or keywords individually.

Tagging does allow collaborative organization when talking about things like social bookmarking, but it has a benefit even in organizing personal, non-collaborative data (such as email). I can label an email in my Gmail account with any number of tags, and can find that email later by searching for any one of those tags. By contrast, in older email systems I’d have to pick a folder — one and only one folder — to put an email in. If I wanted to place an email in two different folders I’d have to make a duplicate of that email. The folder system or hierarchical classification is inefficient, and often results in duplication of information.

As Rashmi Sinha says in her blog post on the Cognitive Analysis of Tagging, trying to force something into a specific category has extra cognitive cost that tagging does not.

This inefficiency of the traditional, hierarchical way or organizing information makes me wonder if human language is inefficient for the same reasons. I was talking to friend today who had to present her ideas in a meeting. She was only half-joking when she remarked how it would be so much easier if she could just transfer her thoughts into someone else’s head. The ideas are easy, it’s the translating them into coherent language that’s difficult.

In other words, it’s the forcing-our-thoughts-into-language that is so difficult. Maybe that’s because doing so has the same high cognitive cost as forcing information into a specific category.

I think tagging could mark a change in the way we organize our information, and by extension, the way we organize our knowledge. Knowledge (and communication of knowledge, i.e language) has been inefficient because we’ve stuck to linear, hierarchical methods. If folksonomy overtakes taxonomy, and tagging reigns over hierarchies, could it change the way we communicate?