« Project Censored's Top 25 Censored Media Stories, 2003 - 2004 | Main | Technorati has winners! » Folksonomies R UsWhat's "folksonomy"? Wikipedia has a good definition: Folksonomy is a neologism for a practice of collaborative categorization using simple tags in a flat namespace. This feature has begun appearing in a variety of social software. At present, the best examples of online folksonomies are social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, a bookmark sharing site, and Flickr, for photo sharing. Gmail's labeling system is somewhat similar to the use of tags, but it is not a folksonomy because users cannot share their categorizations. Folksonomy is related to the concept of faceted classification from library science.Louis Rosenfeld is critical of folksonomies, and Clay is critical of Rosenfeld. I think actual practice will prove Clay right: Any comparison of the advantages of folksonomies vs. other, more rigorous forms of categorization that doesn’t consider the cost to create, maintain, use and enforce the added rigor will miss the actual factors affecting the spread of folksonomies. Where the internet is concerned, betting against ease of use, conceptual simplicity, and maximal user participation, has always been a bad idea. jon posted this at 10:54 PM |
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