The trouble with folksonomy (the term)

I’ve been reading a pubsub feed of “folksonomy” and I check in on the tag folksonomy on delicious, technorati & others. It’s quite handy since the concept is used pretty consistently to talk about tagging sites, yet avoids the ambiguity of the term “tagging.” This way I can see what bloggers I don’t already know are saying on the topic. I think the term is going to stick around because it is much more useful than multi-word alternatives in the systems it describes.

The trouble is that folksonomy is used to describe systems that allow users to tag their own content , and systems that allow users to tag the content of others (i.e. delicious). To extend an analogy used here, an author folksonomy is like a book of restaurant ads, and a user folksonomy is like Zagat’s.

There is not a bright red line between author and user folksonomies in practice. You can tag your own URIs in delicious, and blog posts the author tagged in technorati can be re-tagged by delicious users, and so on, but I believe it is a necessary distinction to make conceptually. The real innovation and value is in systems that allow for user folksonomy.


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Published:
05.30.05
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