How do you pronounce that?
“It’s like taxonomy.”
“Oh, not tsunami?”
“No.”
“I’m an idiot.”
I had been writing about, talking up and describing folksonomy for weeks to those that would listen. “What is it again?” I would go on explaining it over and over until the listener finally understood; the whole time I was pronouncing it like folk-tsunami. I first heard the term shortly after the new of the tsunami in the Indian Ocean, I suppose I started calling it folk-tsunami after that, it made sense.
Folksonomy refers to collaboratively categorizing content, whether it is text, web pages, still images, video, etc, by choosing key words to “tag” the information. Web sites such as Del.icio.us, Flikr, Technorati and 43 Things allow you to label and search content according to these “tags.” An example of this would be to look up the tag Nintendo at Technorati and will give you stories related to Nintendo. Some of the stories will be current while others may be of interest. Folksonomy is an interesting and innovative way to organize content on the web.
Now that I know it’s not called folk-tsunami, I kind of like that term better. The potential that folksonomy has for classifying and organizing all content on the web is amazing. It’s like a tsunami, crushing, huge, powerful.
I’m not sure how to equate the power of folksonomy exactly. It’s useful in terms of finding the information you need but different from Google. Maybe the closest I can come is this, Google helps you find the haystack, folksonomy helps you find the needle.
This powerful new way of classifying information is just another development in web technology. I’m not sure where this technology will take us, but its effects will be amazing.
