In case you where wondering:

“A neologism is a word, term, or phrase which has been recently created (“coined”) —often to apply to new concepts, or to reshape older terms in newer language form.” [Wikipedia definition]

A few popular examples include: podcast, google, folksonomy, slashdot effect, blogosphere, email, spam, and let’s not forget internet (not sure how we ever got anything done without that word). Many other favorites fall entirely outside of the realm of technology. For instance, Made-up words in The Simpsons turns up as one of the most heavily bookmarked pages on del.icio.us for the term “neology“.

Some would say that an increase in neologisms indicates that we are living in a period of extreme innovation where new words are constantly required to keep up with all the unique products and services that are being developed. If so, I wonder whether an increase in the production of neologisms could be used as an indicator of economic growth in the larger sense?

Ingar Roggen identifies the importance of neologisms in his writings about innovation and Gestalt theory. For more on this, you can head over to his site and read his article entitled: Root Knowledge. The part that caught my attention was toward the beginning where he outlines the importance of neology with regards to technological change. He starts out by saying, “No new science is possible without neologisms”. He goes on to say some interesting stuff like, “To reject neologisms, often despicably, is to reject scientific development”, and “everybody wanting to contribute new knowledge must be [a neologist]“.

All this fits in nicely with an earlier post i wrote entitled: “folksonomy, and people’s classification management 101” which discusses the flexibility and power of tagging as an alternative to using traditional categories to organize information. The ever-increasing number of social networking services like del.icio.us and technorati are making heavy use of tagging as a way to get at information in interesting and creative ways. One of the coolest things about tagging is that all of the terms that are used are chosen by the people who use them. Anyone is free to come up with their own made up words to describe something new, provided no other word already exists to describe what it is they’re talking about. But new tags, like all neologisms, also require cultural acceptance to ensure their survival. So, as long as the idea behind the word makes some kind of impact on our culture, people will start to use it, and these new folksonomy based softwares will probably serve to facilitate their dissemination and eventual adoption.

Oddly enough, while there are lots of articles on the web dealing with the word “folksonomy”, there isn’t that much out there being written about neology. This is surprising to me, given the growing importance of choosing unique names for new Web 2.0 products and services, standing out as a start-up, building branding, not to mention ranking well on search engines. Currently, searches for the term “neology” on both tech.memorandum and digg.com turned up no results (although “neologism” turned up 1 result on digg: Made-up words in The Simpsons – mentioned above). The same search on del.icio.us only turned up a mere 73 results, and most of these were either definitions of the term or long lists of popular neologisms (the later of which only furthers my point). Compare that number to the 1255 results returned on del.icio.us for the term “folksonomy” and some interesting questions begin to form.

Why are so many people interested in writing about folksonomies? What does it mean if everyone has a relatively equal shot at creating language? How do societies cope with an exponential growth in language (always adding more and more new words, terms and phrases to our vocabularies every year)? And finally, why is there so little being written about the growing significance of neologisms? or am i the only one who finds it interesting that suddenly everybody and their mother is creatively coming up with awesome made up words for all kinds of things from technical jargon to corporate trademarks.

The first line went something like this: “Folksonomy is a neologism for a practice of collaborative categorization using freely chosen keywords.”

Not a good start. I’m thinking, “great. now i have to look up neologism”. So i did (but i won’t get into it you can read about it here).

If you read a bit further, the wikipedia says that folksonomy “refers to a group of people cooperating spontaneously to organize information into categories”. We see this type of thing happening all over the web, and if you use it regularly, chances are you’re already part of one. Some of the more popular examples of these include internet based softwares like Flickr, del.icio.us and Technorati which allow small communities of people to apply tags to posts, pictures, bookmarks, and just about anything else you can think of. The end result is usually a set of searchable keywords or topics that are all in some way loosely related to the subject matter.

The term folksonomy has been attributed to Thomas Vander Wal and is a combination of the words folk (or people) and taxonomy (which itself comes from the Greek words “taxis” and “nomos” – meaning classification and management). Put it all together and you’ve got “people’s classification management”[wikipedia].

This system is sometimes considered to be more flexible than conventional forms of hierarchical organization, because it doesn’t force content to be classified under a fixed set of categories. Furthermore, “advocates of folksonomy believe it produces results that reflect more accurately the population’s conceptual model of the information” [wikipedia]. There is a growing debate surrounding the subject of folksonomy with regards to tags versus traditional categories. Each side argues the benefits of either a Many-to-Many, or a Many-to-One based system. I think that ultimately it will be these new communities who decide what is most useful, and there is nothing that any 1 person can do about. It’s happening already, these people are the most vocal (on the web), they have the tools and they’re going to use them.

Flexibility is the key to all of this and it seems to be essential when it comes to managing large amounts of data.

Tags are simply more flexible than traditional categories, and by that i mean: Tags can do both.

They can be used loosely or in a strict (traditional category) sense. People who worry about order, structure, hierarchy, can still use tags. One tag per item, just like a category. Others, can go ahead and tag away to their hearts content. And if you’re like me you can even use both.

But you just can’t do that with categories. When something doesn’t fit into a fixed set of categories, out of frustration, we are forced to create a new category.. then another, and another, and so on. As the list of categories grows, it’s only a matter of time until you’re faced with an item that could easily fit into two or more categories. Many of the categories seem similar, and the solution this time is to classify the content under more than one category. Once you’ve taken this step though, you could already be considered tagging. The structure begins to collapse, categories as a system of classification begins to lose meaning. There seems to be a logical progression here that isn’t easy to deny. It just feels like the natural evolution of things to me.

So from my perspective, the debate was over before it began.

References:

1. Wikipedia definition of: folksonomy
2. Article: Many-to-Many: Folksonomy