Ratcatcher over at the tunaiskewl blog has a great post about the use of tagging in the context of a medical library. She mentions quite a lot of examples using Connotea.

One of the prominent tensions that exists between traditional library methods and the rise of web2.0 technologies seems to be the status of fixed taxonomies vs. emergent folksonomies.

Having finally gotten around to reading this article by Golder and Huberman on the structure of collaborative tagging systems last week while I was on holiday, I was intrigued to see that they have a proof that tag clouds that are used by many people draw down to a semi-stable state according to dynamics that follows the urn model that Eggenberger and Polya developed to describe stochastic disease contamination.

One of the processes that makes this happen is by displaying a list of tags that other people have used for a resource. In this way certain tags become infectious, if you will.

I noticed that Connotea does not at the moment support one of the mechanisms thst lesd to this behaviour, as we only give a list of tags that a person has used, however this should not totally stop the effect from happening in connotea, if we have a population of people who have a shared information background. Still we could do better, and this is one of this areas that we are looking at at the moment.