Folksonomy
From Biocrawler, the free encyclopedia.
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. In contrast to formal classification methods, 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 reflect more accurately the population's conceptual model of the information. Folksonomy is not directly related to the concept of faceted classification from library science.
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History and 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" are people. So "folksonomy" literally means "people's classification management". The features that would later be termed "folksonomy" appeared in del.icio.us in late 2003 and were quickly replicated in other social software.
Examples
Social Bookmarking Sites (see article)
Academic Article Sharing Sites
Photo Sharing Site
Sound Sharing Site
- freesound (http://freesound.iua.upf.edu)
News Sharing RSS Aggregator Sites
- 24eyes (http://www.24eyes.com)
- TagCloud (http://www.tagcloud.com)
- Feedmarker (http://www.feedmarker.com)
- NewsGator (http://www.newsgator.com)
- BigBlogZoo (http://www.bigblogzoo.com)
Goal Sharing Site
Search Engines
Website Sharing Sites
Music Recommendation and Association Sites
Tag Based Discussion Site
- Tagsurf (http://tagsurf.com/)
Poetry Sites
- Poetry X (http://poetryx.com)
Web Directory
Social Events Calendar
- Upcoming.org (http://upcoming.org/)
Business Directory
- HotFrog.com.au (http://www.hotfrog.com.au/)
- Gmail's labeling system is similar to the use of Tags, but it is not a folksonomy as users cannot share their categorizations.
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 Biocrawler (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 Biocrawler 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)
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 Wired (http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.04/view.html?pg=4)
- 'Folksonomies: Power to the People' (http://www.iskoi.org/doc/folksonomies.htm) a complete overview of the world-wide discussion about folksonomies from the ISKO
External links
- Technorati's folksonomy tag (http://www.technorati.com/tags/folksonomy) The most recent blog articles tagged with folksonomy.
- 24eyes - RSS Dashboard with tagging capabilities (http://www.24eyes.com/)
- tagbert - a tag aggregator (http://tagbert.com/)
- freesound - sound-sharing with tagging capabilites (http://freesound.iua.upf.edu/)
- 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.
- Anthropology News article (http://wiki.oxus.net/Folksonomy) on folksonomy.
- Gataga's folksonomy search (http://www.gataga.com/search.php?q=folksonomy) The most recent bookmarks on folksonomy
