Flickr gets the academic look-see

I read Folksonomies – Cooperative Classification and Communication Through Shared Metadata after seeing a link from Peter Merholz, and then I read Clay Shirky’s Notes from ITP: Flickr-as-web-services edition. Nothing here is formally peer-reviewed, in the academic sense, but all of it gets reviewed publicly all the same. By the way, I’d choose between “tagonomy” or “social tagging” to describe the categorization process embodied in Flickr.

I was also interested to see Mappr, since it’s a manifestation of an idea I was talking to a colleague about before the holidays. Maps are metaphors everyone understands for navigation. Whether it’s the right metaphor or not depends, but it passes the instant “I get it” test.