Folksonomy: social classification

Abstract

Thomas Vander Wal in his reply, coined a great name for these informal social categories: a folksonomy. I think folksonomies can work well for certain kinds of information because they offer a small reward for using one of the popular categories (such as your photo appearing on a popular page). People who enjoy the social aspects of the system will gravitate to popular categories while still having the freedom to keep their own lists of tags. On the other hand, I can see a few reasons why a folksonomy would be less than ideal in a lot of cases: None of the current implementations have synonym control (e.g. "selfportrait" and "me" are distinct Flickr tags, as are "mac" and "macintosh" on Del.icio.us). Also, there's a certain lack of precision involved in using simple one-word tags-like which Lance are we talking about? (Though this is great for discovery, e.g. hot or Edmonton) And, of course, there's no heirarchy and the content types (bookmarks, photos) are fairly simple. Still, the idea of socially constructed classification schemes (with no input from an information architect) is interesting. Maybe one of these services will manage to build a social thesaurus. Posted by Gene Smith on Aug 3, 2004