Mr. Sifry:

While I too found the sign in the photo Rebecca Blood objected to distasteful, it certainly DID belong in the MLK tag stream. It’s clear that the person who posted it wasn’t trying to game the system. It is related to the tag MLK, coming from a protest that explicitly invoked his name. The POINT of the social tagging network is not to reinforce groupthink about what is appropriate a priori, but to reflect on what real people make appropriate through the connections they draw in these systems.

It’s almost unpardonably na�¯ve for people to engage with folksonomy, wring their hands about cultural misappropriation, representation, and outright imperialism, and then call for the censorship of information that doesn’t conform to their particular socio-cultural constructions.

I hope Technorati will avoid getting into that business even as it investigates new way to deal with the very real potential problems of gaming inherent in any of these systems.