I rambled a bit about tagging, community, Web 2.0, folkosonomy and Sharing Links over at my BarbaraFeldman.com blog, and thought I should post an excerpt here as well:

Today’s rambling is about tags, folksonomy, and the sharing of knowledge. This is a topic that is both completely simple (a “tag” is a user-created label or keyword) and complex at the same time. If all users are creating their own tags (or labels or categories) .. then how do we find a common ground to share information or knowledge?

During the loosely defined Web 2.0 evolution, users stepped up to share in the online conversation. And user input (with votes, tags, and knowledge) became more important than the one-to-many publishing model. Business books with titles such as “The Wisdom of the Crowds,” “Wikinomics” and “We are Smarter than Me” began spouting the knowledge of the many.

It was in this spirit that I created Sharing Links, a place for educators to share their knowledge in the form of bookmarks and tags. The site is still in “Beta” because it is not yet finished in a technical sense, nor in a community sense. During the first few months of 2008, however, will I will be unfolding some new and pretty exciting next steps. …. click to continue.