Folksonomy? September 10
A paper by Nicolas Auray entitled Folksonomy: The New Way to Serendipity, discusses the theory of Folksonomy which expands the collaborative process by allowing contributors to index content. It rests on three powerful properties: the absence of a prior taxonomy, multi-indexation and the absence of thesaurus. It concerns a more exploratory search than an entry in a search engine. Its original relationship-based structure (the three-way relationship between users, content and tags) means that folksonomy allows various modalities of curious explorations: a cultural exploration and a social exploration.
![]()
Woah, What does this mean?
Folksonomy is a classification scheme that uses wisdom of crowd rather than experts to parse content. The idea of a folksonomy is closely related to tagging. It’s a folksonomy if you’re doing it on a social site like flickr or Technorati. Otherwise, you could just dub it tagsonomy.
![]()
Check out Clay Shirky’s (author of the book Here Comes Everybody) presentation form the 2005 TED conference on Institutions vs. Collaboration for a coherent explanation of how the crowd’s tagging of photos, articles, youtube videos, whatever, is indexing content that makes information searchable in a way that would not be possible in a top down, institutionalized model.


