I rarely dip into this debate in public but I’d like to offer a whole-hearted endorsement of the last two paragraphs in your entry.

Since this debate cropped up, I have been a bit bewildered about why people insist on pitting these different methodologies as adversaries. Pragmatic and contextual uses of, both, “well-designed” categorizations and emergent social categories seems quite promising.

The energy surrounding these debates should occur at the messier ground-level: deciding when and how to adjust pre-existing taxonomies with emergent terms/categories and deciding when emergent terms/categories should not cause these adjustments.

I have written about these kinds of activities here.

Let’s face it — even before the advent of the term “folksonomy” and social tagging tools, we undertook activities that were folksonomic.

A librarian might have suggested a new section in the library where materials that have been in demand are centralize and then used a popular, colloquial term to identify them.

A zoo’s layout is designed according to people’s expectations of how animals should be grouped rather than on strict zoological taxonomies. Lions and Tigers and Bears…oh my.

Search term log files have been mined to identify terms that are not represented in a web site’s categorization scheme. These terms then drive the decision to adjust the site’s structure and terminology…and so on.

As is often the case with intellectual debates, people tend to draw opposing poles when there is plenty of overlap available.