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.