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Christine Robinson's Library tagged folksonomies →  View Popular, Search in Google

Oct
5
2008

This is the original blog post that brought the term "folksonomy" to the world wide web audience. It provides a short list of the benefits and drawbacks of folksonomy at the time of the post (2004).

atomiq.org/...omy_social_classification.html
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folksonomy classification tagging folksonomies tags social_classification

in list: EDES 501

    • think folksonomies can work well for certain kinds of information because  they offer a small reward for using one of the popular categories (such as your  photo appearing on a popular page). People who enjoy the social aspects of the  system will gravitate to popular categories while still having the freedom to  keep their own lists of tags.

       

      On the other hand, I can see a few reasons why a folksonomy would be less  than ideal in a lot of cases:

       
      • None of the current implementations have synonym control (e.g. "selfportrait" and "me" are distinct Flickr tags, as  are "mac" and "macintosh" on Del.icio.us).  
      • Also, there's a certain lack of precision involved in using simple one-word  tags--like which Lance are we  talking about? (Though this is great for discovery, e.g. hot or Edmonton)  
      • And, of course, there's no heirarchy and the content types (bookmarks,  photos) are fairly simple.
       

      Still, the idea of socially constructed classification schemes (with no input  from an information architect) is interesting. Maybe one of these services will  manage to build a social thesaurus.

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