Folksonomies/Tagging
From AmbientLibrarian
Libraries have traditionally used controlled vocabularies like the Library of Congress Subject Headings to guide users to material. On the Web, many sites have allowed individuals to "tag" content with whatever terms they think are descriptive. Out of these "folksonomies" (from "folks" and "taxonomy") come accepted terms and ways of searching. Some examples:
- One of the first successful "social bookmarking" sites, del.icio.us allows users to post useful, interesting, or otherwise memorable websites with short descriptions and tags.
- One of the largest photo-sharing sites on the Web, flickr uses tagging extensively to guide users to photos of what they seek.
- Google has turned the creation of a useful folksonomy into a game. Players are paired up randomly with other players and then try to come up with a matching term to describe an image from the Google Images search site, with more descriptive terms gaining more points. As images are labeled by multiple pairs, common labels are taken "off-limits" and more obscure ones must be used.
