An impressive new idea from the world of librarians, cataloguers and other reference technicians called Folksonomies has taken root in the world of web search. This new technology exploits users’ time to classify and meta-label the web through browsing. The promise of this new categorization sytem would be the documentation of the web by each website’s and web page’s visitors.
An exceptional paper on the subject, Folksonomies – Cooperative Classification and Communication Through Shared Metadata, by Adam Mathes explains the concepts behind the technology and the sites that currently use them – Del.icio.us and Flickr.
So, surprisingly, a folksonomy is not when Bob Dylan gets a vasectomy… but, it’s a good guess.
