A folksonomy is a crowd-sourced classification scheme, often used in tagging, which allows users to add relevant words to describe content. It is exemplified by services like del.ic.ious and Technorati, and can be represented visually through tagclouds. The concept of folksonomy is relatively new and was coined by information architect Thomas Vander Wal.
In contrast to a taxonomy, which can be roughly translated as “classification management,” a folksonomy is a classification scheme that uses a crowd rather than experts to analyze content. The idea of a folksonomy is closely related to tagging, which has enjoyed great vogue in online circles since at least 2005.
The word folksonomy is a combination of folks, which means “people”, and -onomy, which means “management”. Literally, this can be understood as “management by people” and has nothing to do with the classification – which comes from the tax code – but the meaning is usually easy to guess from the context. It’s also a relatively new word, so it usually comes with a definition when mentioned in text.
Tagging is exemplified by the social bookmarking service del.ic.ious, which originally started as a one-person part-time project, but was quickly acquired by Yahoo for $60 million (USD). Del.ic.ious allows you to tag any web page you visit with relevant words to describe its content. Anyone can view web pages matching a specific tag, or see what tags a particular page has received. This concept of tagging is synonymous with the phrase metadata and has been around for decades, but it never caught on until the advent of del.ic.ious.
Technorati tagging service allows users to do the same thing with blog posts. Because these are provided by the poster rather than the unbiased visitors, technorati tags don’t always accurately reflect the post content, but 99.9% of the time they do. Technorati tags are extremely popular and today a substantial portion of all bloggers use them. Tagging frequency graphs allow us a peek into mass consciousness — sometimes called the zeitgeist — for example, we saw a huge spike in cases of the “Katrina” tag after the hurricane of the same name.
A visual representation of a folksonomy is the tagcloud, a sequence of differently sized words that represent popular tags by displaying them in a larger font. Tagclouds can be constrained in several ways: for example, everyone who tags will accumulate a personal tagcloud that reflects how often they use a given tag. A community can create a tagcloud describing its interests by merging the personal tagclouds of its members. Top-level tagclouds are created by sites like del.ic.ious when they compile tagclouds by showing the most popular tags in a given time period, such as the previous week, at a glance.
WiseGEEK founder Denis Grosz came up with a variation of the tagging idea called nesstags when he suggested a scheme for adding numbers to tags to describe how intense or prototypical a tag example is. For example, we might tag photos of items based on how “purple” they are. Something very purple might be labeled “purple9”, while something only slightly purple would be “purple2”. This could give rise to a much more sophisticated folksonomy.
Since tagging and the concept of folksonomy are all the rage right now, they are often used in marketing to generate hype and as a result should be taken with a grain of salt. The term folksonomy was originally coined by information architect Thomas Vander Wal.
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