I'm sure this must sound like anathema to advocates of the emergent, interactive Web 2.0, but I'm not advocating static archives created by some central authority. Rather, I'm talking about living archives created by the community. To be concrete, folksonomy is an example of an emergent, community-created archive. In folksonomy people “tag the Internet” and then share their tags with the community. As people in the community start to tag the same items, rough consensus emerges over the prevalent community views (tags) regarding these items along with a sampling of the diversity of viewpoints that surround them. As such, folksonomy captures both the consensus and the dissent that surrounds all cultural artifacts.

Over time, the navigation structure derived from folksonomy is richer and messier than what might arise from a formal taxonomic approach or a ratings system that consists merely of evaluations. My guess is that some of the major problems that have been noted in this area derive from the fact that most folksonomies are open to the world at large. In this regard, I think limited scope real-world experiments like Infoworld's use of folksonomy in its editorial process will be instructive. InfoWorld is a focused publication, and the editors are more or less on the same page. Thus, there is likely to be consensus on their main views of the world but still plenty of room for dissent.

What might emerge from the InfoWorld experiment is a reasonable navigation structure along with enough underlying disagreement to make for interesting exploration. The value to the InfoWorld editor community is a record of what they found important over time and where they disagreed, in other words the things that shaped their intellectual output, the ultimate reason for being of their community.

The general message for those wishing to create decentralized communities is that the success of the archiving strategy, not just capturing zeitgeist, will determine the community's long-term success or failure. The ongoing debate over things like folksonomy will provide us with a public record of emerging archive strategies that do and don't work.