Folksonomies and tags
in Bokardo.comThere's a very interesting series of posts on folksonomies at bokardo.com (found via ssn). The quoted bit really touched a nerve here. The separation of tagging and taxonomy, in the emergent process of ad-hoc classification we now call folksonomy, is pretty obvious a-posteriori. However, the two foremost folksonomies, flickr and delicious, being tag-based may suggest tags are needed for a folksonomy. Not true.Although the two most talked-about folksonomies, del.icio.us and flickr, use tags, we don't need them to create similar, powerful tools. All we need is something that we can aggregate.
So instead of asking "how can I create a tagging system for my site?", we might ask: "how can I aggregate and leverage the behavior of people on my site?". When asked in this way, we recognize many examples of this being done right now.
At blog.com we've just started trying to extract information from profile and post category information. An example here. It's an endless fun, surfing blogs using common post categories. More than fun, it is now exceedingly clear that profile info and post category info can be used as the source of a taxonomy, creating as much of a folksonomy as delicious' or flickr's.
