Folksonomy as savvy / scurrilous search engine optimisation

Bud Gibson follows up on the tagging / folksonomy discussion that Stephen and him kicked off over here (one of the benefits of subscribe to comments on WordPress I guess!)

In particular Bud points to the impact of tags on search engine results and argues:

“as illustrated by the technorati example, folksonomy tags are more than just tools to add meaning. They in effect act as content aggregation points that can be used by socially entrepreneurial firms like technorati to gain a foothold in web visibility for emerging topics.” [The Community Engine]

This is certainly a fascinating perspective and I as Bud says is more a testament to the brilliance of Technorati et al. than an attack on the malicious use of tags, but as he also argues:

“The question content providers face is whether they want technorati or any other repository to act as an intervening link between them and searchers.”

Which, ironically (possibly), sounds like exactly the kind of question raised frequently by Stephen and others about the use of third party tools.

I think this is an absolutely nail on the head interpretation and lets me see clearly for the first time the real problem I’ve had with folksonomies / tagging etc. since the start. Tagging should not be third party facilitated. Out categories, titles, paragraphs, pictures, audio, sentences and words are tags… forming a folksonomy through the web and we need to work on that. Not on pinging Technorati or anyone else.