Folksonomy

Folksonomy is a neologism for a practice of collaborative categorization using freely chosen keywords. More colloquially, this refers to a group of people cooperating spontaneously to organize information into categories, noted because it is almost completely unlike traditional formal methods of faceted classification. This phenomenon typically only arises in non-hierarchical communities such as public websites as opposed to multi-level teams. Since the organizers of the information are usually its primary users, folksonomy produces results that more accurately reflect the population's conceptual model of the information.

History and Examples

This feature appeared in del.icio.us in 2004 and was quickly replicated in other social software. Some other examples of online folksonomies are other social bookmarking sites such as bookmark-sharing sites Simpy (http://www.simpy.com/), Jots (http://jots.com/) and technorati (http://www.technorati.com); photo-sharing site Flickr; sound-sharing site freesound (http://freesound.iua.upf.edu); news sharing rss-aggregator 24eyes (http://www.24eyes.com), goal-sharing site 43 Things; academic article sharing sites CiteULike and Connotea (http://www.connotea.org); website sharing sites StumbleUpon (http://stumbleupon.com); music recommendation and association sites GenieLab and Upto11; tag-based discussion site Tagsurf (http://tagsurf.com/); web directory Zenome; web-based RSS/Atom aggregator and bookmarks manager Feedmarker (http://www.feedmarker.com); and social events calendar Upcoming.org ( http://upcoming.org/).

Gmail's labeling system is somewhat similar to the use of Tags, but it is not a folksonomy as users cannot share their categorizations. Folksonomy is not directly related to the concept of faceted classification from library science.

Academic Studies

Folksonomy is currently understood somewhat narrowly as "tagging." Social sciences and anthropology have long studied "folk classifications"—how average people (non-experts) classify the world around them. One reference is Harold Conklin's Folk Classification: A Topically Arranged Bibliography of Contemporary and Background References Through 1971 (1972, ISBN 0913516023)

Folksonomies work best when a large number of users all describe the same piece of information. For instance, on del.icio.us, many people have bookmarked Wikipedia (http://del.icio.us/url/bca8b85b54a7e6c01a1bcfaf15be1df5), each with a different set of words to describe it. Among the various tags used, del.icio.us shows that reference, wiki, and encyclopedia are the most popular, while Simpy also shows you the popularity of a link over time, for instance trace Wikipedia popularity over time (http://www.simpy.com/simpy/LinkHistory.do?href=http%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FMain_Page&v=1).

"Jon Udell (2004) argues that the idea of abandoning taxonomy in favor of lists of keywords is not new, and that the fundamental difference in these systems is feedback." [1] (http://www.adammathes.com/academic/computer-mediated-communication/folksonomies.html)

Word Origin
A portmanteau of the words folk (or folks) and taxonomy, the term folksonomy has been attributed to Thomas Vander Wal. Taxonomy is from "taxis" and "nomos" (from Greek). Taxis means classification. Nomos (or nomia) means management. Folk is people. So folksonomy means people's classification management.

References
Gene Smith on folksonomy (http://atomiq.org/archives/2004/08/folksonomy_social_classification.html)
Clay Shirky on folksonomy (http://www.corante.com/many/archives/2004/08/25/folksonomy.php)
Vanderwal on folksonomy (http://www.vanderwal.net/random/category.php?cat=153)
Mob indexing? Folk categorization? Social tagging? (http://www.peterme.com/archives/000444.html)
Folksonomies - Cooperative Classification and Communication Through Shared Metadata by Adam Mathes (http://www.adammathes.com/academic/computer-mediated-communication/folksonomies.html) Widely praised paper on folksonomy
Peter Van Dijck on Emergent i18n effects in folksonomies (http://poorbuthappy.com/ease/archives/2005/01/15/2419/)
Salon.com's popular introduction to Folksonomy (http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2005/02/08/tagging/)
Bruce Sterling article on folksonomy from WiredExternal links
24eyes - RSS Dashboard with tagging capabilities (http://www.24eyes.com/)
tagbert - a tag aggregator (http://tagbert.com/)
Complete list of folksonomies and their tools (http://tagging.pagina.nl/)
Flickr and "folksonomies" (http://blogger.iftf.org/Future/000664.html)
MetaFilter folksonomy (http://www.metafilter.com/tags.mefi)
Technorati folksonomy (http://www.technorati.com/tag/)
Folksonomy Encyclopedia of Terms (http://seokeywordanalysis.com/seotools/infobase/folksonomy/)
Folksonomizer (http://blog.forret.com/blog/2005/02/folksonomizer-generic-folksonomy.html): generic folksonomy service
/del.icio.us/tag/folksonomy (http://del.icio.us/tag/folksonomy) del.icio.us social bookmarks on folksonomy
Podcast Tags folksonomy (http://podcasttag.com/) folksonomy specific to podcasts
getluky.net/freetag/ Freetag, an generalized open source folksonomy implementation for PHP / MySQL applications.