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Folksonomy is a neologism for a practice of collaborative categorization using freely chosen keywords. This feature began appearing in a variety of social software in 2004. Some examples of online folksonomies being social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us and Jots (http://jots.com/) which are bookmark sharing sites, Flickr, for photo sharing, 43 Things, for goal sharing, and Tagsurf (http://tagsurf.com/), for tag-based discussions. Gmail's labeling system is somewhat similar to the use of tags, but it is not a folksonomy as users cannot share their categorizations. Folksonomy is not directly related to the concept of faceted classification from library science.
Folksonomy is currently understood somewhat narrowly as "tagging." Social sciences and anthropology have long studied "folk classifications"how average people (non-experts) classify the world around them. One reference is Harold Conklin's Folk Classification: A Topically Arranged Bibliography of Contemporary and Background References Through 1971 (1972, ISBN 0913516023)
Folksonomies work best when a large number of users all describe the same piece of information. For instance, on del.icio.us, many people have bookmarked Wikipedia (http://del.icio.us/url/bca8b85b54a7e6c01a1bcfaf15be1df5), each with a different set of words to describe it. Among the various tags used, del.icio.us shows that reference, wiki, and encyclopedia are the most popular.
"Jon Udell (2004) argues that the idea of abandoning taxonomy in favor of lists of keywords is not new, and that the fundamental difference in these systems is feedback."[1] (http://www.adammathes.com/academic/computer-mediated-communication/folksonomies.html)
A portmanteau of the words folk (or folks) and taxonomy, the term folksonomy has been attributed to Thomas Vander Wal. Taxonomy is from "taxis" and "nomos" (from Greek). Taxis means classification. Nomos (or nomia) means management. Folk is people (from German). So folksonomy means people's classification management.
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