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

In July, there was a spike in both the site’s page rank and page views. No doubt this number was a bit inflated by the fact that bloggers probably have more time on their hands in the summer. However, this number seems to be tapering off as we enter the second half of July, although some might attribute this to the Google PageRank update that occured recently. Still, considering it increased it’s rank by 1,166 in the last 3 months, i think that it might be poised to crack the top 500 (out of all other websites combined).

For those who are unfamiliar with Technorati, it is essetially a site that tracks, in real-time (nearly) what other bloggers are talking about. It is currently tracking 13.5 million sites and 1.3 billion links. Technorati tags are like search terms, and today many blogging softwares like Movable Type, WordPress, TypePad, Blogware, and Radio are already creating Technorati tags out of the very categories that you’ve created in your favorite software. But aside from using these tags to optimize their blogs, i noticed that you can also use the additional series of links and photos along the right-hand side of the keyword search results page to increase you site’s exposure.

From the Technorati Help Page:

The photos come from Flickr and Buzznet, two online photo sharing communities. If you’d like your photos to appear on our tag pages, join Flickr or join Buzznet and post your photos there. And remember to tag ‘em! Technorati includes public photographs tagged by members of Flickr and Buzznet.

The links come from web-based bookmark services Delicious and Furl. If you would like to contribute links to Technorati Tag pages, you can join Delicious or join Furl and post some links.

I am not exactly sure what the relationship between each of these 5 sites is, but i can definitely see their value from a web marketing perspective. As far as search engines are concerned, this interlinking allows site owners to improve their overall page ranking, by increasing the potential for developing referral or inbound links. It will definitely be interesting to see how these sites develop in the coming months.