Excellent primer by Adaptive Path’s Peter Merholz on ‘ethnoclassification’, aka the ad-hoc tagging strategies deployed within the likes of del.icio.us and Flickr, amongst others. Good and straightforward, including the pros and cons of such a strategy as well as a nice picture of an adaptive path.

There’s more on the background to this – ethnoclassification and vernacular vocabularies, why they’re not taxonomies, and some good discussion – in a post from August over at Peter’s blog. There’s also a chance to comment on this latest essay there too.

Adaptive Path: Metadata for the Masses