Yet another new blend: "folksonomy"

[Benjamin Zimmer]

Hard to keep track of all the new cyberblends.  Now there's "folksonomy".
See:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folksonomy
http://www.iawiki.net/FolksOnomy

Some cites:

Gene Smith, "Atomiq: Folksonomy: social classification." Aug 3, 2004
http://atomiq.org/archives/2004/08/folksonomy_social_classification.html
Last week I asked the AIfIA members' list what they thought about the
social classification happening at Furl, Flickr and Del.icio.us. In each
of these systems people classify their pictures/bookmarks/web pages with
tags (e.g. wedding), and then the most popular tags float to the top (e.g.
Flickr's tags or Del.icio.us on the right). Thomas Vander Wal, in his
reply, coined a great name for these informal social categories: a
folksonomy.

Thomas Vander Wal, "You Down with Folksonomy?" Aug 4, 2004
http://www.vanderwal.net/random/entrysel.php?blog=1529
Gene supplies a good overview of Folksonomy, which is the bottom-up social
classification that takes place on Flickr, del.icio.us, etc.

Clay Shirkey, "Folksonomy." Aug 25, 2004
http://www.corante.com/many/archives/2004/08/25/folksonomy.php
Folksonomy, a new term for socially created, typically flat name-spaces of
the del.icio.us ilk, coined by Thomas Vander Wal.

Adam Mathes, "Folksonomies - Cooperative Classification and Communication
Through Shared Metadata." December 2004
http://www.adammathes.com/academic/computer-mediated-communication/folksonomies.html
The organic system of organization developing in Delicious and Flickr was
called a “folksonomy” by Thomas Vander Wal in a discussion on an
information architecture mailing list (Smith, 2004). It is a combination
of "folk" and "taxonomy."

Louis Rosenfeld, "Folksonomies? How about Metadata Ecologies?" Jan 6, 2005
http://louisrosenfeld.com/home/bloug_archive/000330.html
Lately, you can't surf information architecture blogs for five minutes
without stumbling on a discussion of folksonomies (there; it happened
again!).

Peter van Dijck, "Emergent i18n effects in folksonomies." Jan 15, 2005
http://poorbuthappy.com/ease/archives/2005/01/15/2419/
Folksonomies are taxonomies created by users who add tags to things.
Folksonomies are messy and have a lot of problems, but their great merit
is that they're scalable and they use the users' terminology by
definition, a serious problem with more classic taxonomies that are
created by information architects or librarians.



--Ben Zimmer