You probably noticed that the trend on web sites is to let you assign “tags” to some contents. These tags are keywords you freely choose for describing those contents.
For example, on Flickr, people give tags to their pictures. On del.icio.us, people tag their links.
By doing this, visitors of those sites can then browse the site content by browsing or searching thru the tags. It’s great — I love this!
Well, I actually discovered last week that this phenomenon is called folksonomy.
The Wikipedia defines it as:
…a neologism for a practice of collaborative categorization using freely chosen keywords. More colloquially, this refers to a group of people cooperating spontaneously to organize information into categories. In contrast to formal classification methods, this phenomenon typically only arises in non-hierarchical communities, such as public websites, as opposed to multi-level teams…
This phenomenon has a social component. When tagging, people are not limited to a set of established keywords, they can actually assign any tag of their choice. So the tag set represents people minds and is virtually unlimited.
Folksonomy based sites use to represent the tag set as a so-called “tag cloud”, where each tag boldness (or font size) shows the tag’s popularity amongs the users: the bigger the tag, the most popular it is.
Usually you can syndicate to any part of those sites, using RSS feeds (by user, by tags, most popular or newest entries…).
Here are some folksonomy based sites which I know and/or use (there must be a lot more — feel free to let me know them!):
* Flickr: place there your pictures repository,
* del.icio.us and RawSugar: social bookmarking sites,
* Readers2: Social list of books, share your reading experience with other people,
* MyProgs: Social list of programs - share your working experience with other people.
* 43Things: What do you want to do with your life?,
* Bank Of Ideas: store and share your ideas (for the moment it’s not working very well. It seems a bit experimental)…
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