Folksonomies

A new emerging user driven phenomenon is called "tagging" or "folksonomies" (short for folks and taxonomy). Tagging is powerful because users are creating an organizational structure for online content. Folksonomies not only enable people to file away content under tags, but, even better, share it with others by filing it under a global taxonomy that they created.

Folksonomies therefore convey information on multiple levels, including information about the people who create them, and they therefore invite human engagement. Folksonomies, a new user-driven approach to organizing information, may help alleviate some of the challenges of taxonomies. Folksonomies are said to support emergent classification, where the semantic value of the tags and their relation to one another is worked out through a negotiated process of users applying their selected tags and seeing what others. Folksonomies are providing new ways in which to search for specific topics through its reliance on user-created keywords.

Internet

Folksonomic categories are de novo categories that Internet users invent to express how they make sense of the online world. The idealistic, over enthusiastic and highly dynamic vision of the Internet pioneers suddenly imploded, leaving room for a period of rational pragmatism, refinement and reflection in which costs and value maximization gained.

In the flood of information that comprises the internet (as well as intranets), this is incredibly important. The websites supporting this type of content generating is gaining hype and are emerging rapidly on internet. There are mainly two commonly cited folksonomies websites in work on internet: Flickr and Del. FlickrFlicker allows people to share their pictures with their family, friends and other people on internet.

Moreover, beyond its practicality, others find a philosophical significance in tagging because it is consistent with the social thinking often associated with the beginnings of the Internet. A final criticism one could make of folksonomies as classification systems is that their advocates seem to assume everything on the Internet needs to be organized and classified. The Internet technologies of the subsequent generation have been profoundly social, as listservs, Usenet groups, discussion software, groupware, and Web-based communities have linked people around the world. This desire to discover, publish, and share appears far back in Internet history.

Conclusion

One of the most promising features of folksonomies is that there is no disconnect between the user's words and the words on the site: the users words are the words on the site. The value in folksonomies is derived from many people adding their own tags (often so they can find the information again, but easily). One feature of folksonomies is their uncontrolled nature, another is their organic growth.

The real power of broad folksonomies is in the richness of the mass, in people explicitly exposing their way to define and describe things that leads to the long tail and power curve. An interesting property of folksonomies is that they are inclusive. The key thing about folksonomies is that they consist of one word tags, with perhaps multiple tags applying to a resource. I wonder if all the attention to folksonomies is deserved because they depend on people to be able to reasonably categorize what they are talking about.

One interesting possibility I do see in folksonomies is the opportunity to get in early and influence how your blog posts and other online archives are summarized by suggesting the summaries yourself. The point of folksonomies is to let those consuming the information tag the content so that they can come back to the information more easily as the tags use a vocabulary that is normal for the user. Alternatives and variations the use of folksonomies is not a goal in itself, it is simply a means to an end: increasing findability of information.

The first thing to note about folksonomies is that they already work. The brilliant thing about folksonomies is that internet users have shown themselves time and time again to be remarkably willing to do their part to help the greater good, even if it means doing labor that happens to bring financial benefit to someone else. Several people said to me that the real benefit of folksonomies is that they are "me"-centric. Examining the quantitative aspects of folksonomies is an area that could yield some interesting data on the make up and use of the terms used to describe items. One thing I find useful in folksonomies is that they can represent popular opinion on a particular topic at a particular time.

About the Author

Pius Victor Ephenus is the owner of Life Changing Avenues.Com He has put together educating resources, tips, tools, in the area of blogging - affiliate courses - business development - email marketing - list building, that will of good benefit to your business.