From a rival site’s page on Lusy Lady a book about a Seattle peepshow.

Pretty impressive tag cloud! I guess lots of people have tagged it “female author.” This must be the important thing here.

Wait, how many of their users have the book? One.

Folksonomy, meet fauxonomy. As Jamais Cascio (via David Weinberger) puts it, fauxonomy is:

“metadata added with the conscious intent to confuse or obfuscate,” or to weight them for spammish reasons.

LibraryThing has 47 members with the book. And 53 tags. With numbers:

The moral: When you have a lot of data you can know what a book is about—note how big “erotica” and “photography” are. When you don’t, pretending doesn’t help.

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