folka on a what?

I have never really been a fan of "onomies." They remind of science and therefore scare me. But with folksonomy I ave finally found one that doesn't send me screaming through my house to hide under my bed until the monsters are gone. A folksonomy is a revolutionary way to sort and classify information. It's revolutionary because is takes the classifcation process out of the hands of the scientists and into the hands of the people who actaully use the classification system. With the development of folksonomies people are connecting to people rather than the system.

In taxonomies, who gets to decide what should be classified under which category? And who’s to say that I would agree with the decisions that they make? The problem with traditional taxonomies lies in the fact that there are 6 billion people in this world who all have 6 billion different opinions and ideas. The chances of all 6 billion people agreeing on one single classification for any given item is in the slimmest percentage of possibility. What folksonomies do is to allow items to have more than one classification. By doing so, it makes the system more user friendly to the people who actually use it.

These types of classification systems are particularly a growing phenomenon on the web. Sites such as Flickr and Webshots allow people to post pictures on the internet and place whatever classifications they wish on them. These are called tags. Simply do search and you will find all the pictures that other people have defined with that particular tag. Sites such as Delicious do the same thing for websites.