Last week Euan Semple commented on a post in High Touch that references a taxonomy vs. folksonomy debate. Euan referred to a comment that the High Touch writer posted in the midst of a taxonomy – folksonomy debate. I agree with Euan that this is a great question that helps to sort out the issues. Here it is:

“Is there any living, breathing example of a taxonomic approach working (scaling) to keep-up with the hyper-efficiency we see in peer-production systems? I’m being quite serious here. Can you point me to a working model.”

There is much on the debate in the comment section on High Touch. Also, see Dave Weinberger, a long advocate of folksonomies, for his useful thoughts on the debate.

I will not repeat all the issues. I do think that there is room for both top down taxonomies and bottom up folksonomies. They can help each other. IBM uses their tagging tool, Dogear, and the folksonomy it generates to update their corporate taxonomy, or so I have heard.

I want to raise a related question, one that I learned from Andrew McAfee’s blog. Whenever I speak on web 2.0 I now ask the audience, will anyone who can find stuff easier on their own company intranet than on the internet, please raise their hand. So far no one has (so the score is several hundred and growing to zero). Andrew reports the same results, perhaps adding thousands to the web side. Here the contrast is taxonomy and controlled vocabulary vs. search that makes use of the social side of web communication, a cousin of folksonomy but something different.

Google makes use of the vast and growing user participation on the web to find the good stuff based on reputation through a secret and ever changing formula. It is wisdom of crowds at its best. There are other tools based on the social side of content such as iQuest, a software product that I am connected with (disclosure). Fast, our sponsor, also looks at relevancy rankings and integrates web content with internal content. They are certainly an advocate of social media.

Inside the firewall where this participation and commentary largely does not happen via social software but via email and other siloed tools, a Google-type search is less effective (although still useful), but this may be temporary. Enterprise 2.0 has the opportunity to bring this participation in discoverable ways inside the firewall and make search tools based on the social interactions around content much more effective. Perhaps then some one will raise their hand on the intranet side at one of my sessions, if I am still doing this when it occurs. I hope so on both counts.