. . . and folksonomies, oh my!

I've already posted about the basics of folksonomy here but I have promised to go into the idea further. A refresher on what folksonomy: folksonomy is the language of free-tagging, which is what social bookmarking utilizes. Lost already? Good.

Social bookmarking is a service like del.icio.us, which works somewhat like the Favorites section of Internet Explorer. If you find a web site that you want to keep for later, there's a button that del.icio.us adds to your browser that lets you "tag" the web page. When you choose to tag a web page, del.icio.us gives you four fields you can fill in: the URL (already filled in), description (the name of the web page, which is already filled in), notes and tags. Notes are just another space where you can write more about the web page. When filling in the "tags" section, you use single words that you think describe the "aboutness" of the web page. For an example, let's use a favorite of mine--BeerAdvocate. If you go to the Beer Advocate web page, you see that it's about beer (really?), reviewing beer, beer festivals, people talking about beer (online communities), among other things. You may come up with other ideas of what it's about, or different ways of saying the same thing (synonyms). So, we take it's "aboutness" and begin to construct single-word terms--beer, reviews, fesitvals, community. That's folksonomy, those terms that you have used to describe the "aboutness." It's taking traditional taxonomies and turning the idea on its head.

What are the benefits of folksonomy? One of the major benefits is that folksonomy allows something previously uncatalogable--such as the internet--and applies the assistance of volunteers (the many who are tagging) in cataloging it. Social networks are created around tagging, where groups of people who tag the same things, or use the same terms, can come together and gain information from one another. Say I was interested in the tag "beer." I can go on del.icio.us and find someone who has a vast collection of web sites that they have tagged with "beer," and I can set up an alert (a RSS feed) that lets me see what they are tagging with the term "beer."

Businesses have jumped onto the folksonomy bandwagon as well, with no less of a notable member than IBM taking part in it. For a company that has an intranet, allowing their employees the ability to tag data within it can allow for more effective searching and increase findability. Employing folksonomy allows people to make sense of a system that is not readily accessible to the layman--such as an intranet or a library catalog. Yes, I don't think that library catalogs are the easiest databases to navigate. One of the major problems is the use of subject headings--they aren't logical, but are the result of a hierarchical taxonomy. Catalogs are getting around this problem by making subject headings searchable by deconstructing them and allowing individual terms within the subject heading to be searchable. But if you are to employ a tagging system with a traditional catalog--like University of Pennsylvania's PennTags--then you can begin to approach the best of both worlds.

Alright, I think I've written enough about folksonomy for now. If you're interested, check out del.icio.us. Or if you've had enough of futuristic mumbo-jumbo, go right to the source that will help you forget about it!