Folksonomies

IA folks have been discussing taxonomy development on a couple of interesting social-networking sites:  del.icio.us and flickr.

A key article explaining the foundation concepts underlying this phenomenon is Folksonomies - Cooperative Classification and Communication Through Shared Metadata.

The author, Adam Mathes, notes that

The organic system of organization developing in Delicious and Flickr was called a "folksonomy" by Thomas Vander Wal in a discussion on an information architecture mailing list (Smith, 2004). It is a combination of "folk" and "taxonomy."
... An important aspect of a folksonomy is that is comprised of terms in a flat namespace: that is, there is no hierarchy, and no directly specified parent-‍child or sibling relationships between these terms.

Check out my bookmarks at http://del.icio.us/jambop -- you can check out tagging patterns in practice by going to the main page and following any of the most popular tags that are stacked along the right-hand side.

I haven't yet established a Flickr account -- I just haven't had enough time to do photography to my own standards -- but it's likewise fascinating to check out how various people use keywords to describe their photos -- signs, auntie, tsunami, bike, orange.  Flickr has a page that tracks the most popular tags. You can get some nice random serendipity by viewing the slideshow.