SXSW - Beyond Taxonomies - Is this like Pigeon English?

First session of the day - Beyond Taxonomies. This panel has a blog at http://www.beyondfolksonomies.com/wordpress

One of the motivations for this panel is to encourage people is to participate in using and creating folksonomies for content at websites you visit.

Pretty heated discuss right out of the gate on what exactly does the word 'folksonomies' mean? How useful are these things like del.icio.us tags, technorati tags and tag clouds - really to people? Good question. But are rigid structures really all that helpful too?

How do we move beyond this issue of everyone tags that are related but named differently -- a big problem with free for all tagging mechanisms.

A new tool to explore is at www.attentiontrust.org - it can optionally monitor and record where you spend your time on the web and stores it into an OPML file. I've been meaning to check this out after hearing so much about this effort from the Gillmor Gang podcasts. (make mental note to test).

Great session with a lot of user participation.

SXSW audio made a fatal error. They had the speakers use a headset. It worked great for the guys but the women didn't wear them. The used a headset for the audience to ask questions and all you could hear was a thunder of popping Ps. Cheap PC heads don't make good microphones for this kind of panel sessions use. I hope they didn't this in all the sessions.

Tom