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Folksonomy is a term I’ve come across recently in a couple of articles and on my company’s blog. To begin with, taxonomy is the science of classification – that’s my understanding. The way in which content creators/librarians/administrators, etc… create categories to classify information.

Folksonomy is play on the word taxonomy. Its how “folks”, normal people like you and me and the general web community can add our own labels known as “tags” to information. A good example is Youtube, Del.ico.us and Flickr and blogs. When you upload information or media, each of these allows the user to apply our own “tags” to create our own categories to search. For example when I finish writing this post on this blog, I have the option of creatiing new tags which allow others and myself to find it when the search function is used. It also will put it in a category allowing others to see it. So I’ll add tags like “taxonomy”, “folksonomy”, “metadata”, etc…

A classical example of a taxonomy is dewey decimal system used for books in libraries. It is a system to classify the hundreds of millions of books, so that users can find books. Folksonomies differ because the user can add their own labels, effectively creating our own kind of dewey decimal system.

The strength of folksnomies is that it allows more users to create labels (tags or if your really nerdy – “metadata”) and is more useful in a system where there are even more information to categorise. In the past, taxonomies were restricted to administrators like librarians or authors (content creators). But now, with the explosion of information, videos, pictures, websites being uploaded and shared on the internet – folksnomies has had its greatest use. It allows scalability – it can grow with the more users and more information that is shared.

I’ve actually being using tags for a while – for my own blogs. It is an easy to keep track of everything and to search for posts. Because I know in my mind what kind of tags I would use.

The second strength of tags is that users are better equipped to label their own information because they are more engaged with the content and have a deeper interaction with it. For example, if I read an article that I like and add it to the social bookmarking site “Del.ico.us” (now www.delicous.com), I will add in labels about what I feel the article is about. I would have read the article, thought about it, etc.. and put related tags opposed to a search engine that uses web crawlers that would scan for the keywords in the article.

However, this is also a weakness of folksonomy because the user is biased as to what that article is about – different users can potentially put vastly different labels. Further, users can use the same labels for different things. As this paper mentions, the tag ANT can refer to “Actor Network Theory” but also “Apache ANT” a programming language. So folksnomies is not without its problems.

One of the interesting things I found with Delicous is that when you are about to save a link and add in your tags, it will actually recommend tags that other people have put on there. I look at them and think “ok, that sounds alright” and you can click on those links – that is one way to help users add labels and create consistency across tagging. I can also add in my own tags as well and ignore the recommended ones.

Folksonomies allow users to create new terms and to start creating paths for finding things. It also can introduce you to new information or media, because you can click on a category or tag and discover what other people have posted up under the same tag.

And to clarify, metadata is the search terms or tags you put into a page, allowing web crawlers to find your information. It is important when putting in the terms for metadata to think of all the various terms a user might type in to find something – for example if you have a company webpage about soccer, you also want to use the term “football” which is what the rest of the world calls it. So the page wont get rejected if people dont type in soccer.

I’m out like folksonomies,

Matt.