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A Short History of Folksonomy |
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Tagging is reasonably new on the
internet. Comparisons have been made
to the inclusion of meta tags in website code, going back as
far as 1996.9
The main difference between folksonomies and meta tags is
that
meta tags are dependent on the website creator while folksonomies
originate with the end user (bottom-up classification).
These social tags only
emerged in the last two years.
The two best known sites to
feature folksonomies are Flickr
and Del.icio.us.
Del.icio.us was launched in late 2003. 10
It allows people to tag
and share their bookmarked internet sites. Flickr appeared in
early 2004, 11
encouraging people to post and tag their digital
photos for free, and to browse or search photos posted by other
members.
Since the popularization of these sites, tagging has been incorporated into a variety of other applications. CiteULike and Connotea use tagging to organize and share academic papers online, Commontimes tags news, Revver tags videos, and Clusty is a clustered tag search engine.  Technorati tracks
blogs. In January 2005 they started keeping track of tags on
blog posts.12
This chart will give you a good image of how quickly tagging
has caught on in the "blogosphere" in the first half of 2005.If you
prefer video to graphs, the Art and Computer Science research group at
Carnegie Mellon has used this data to create a playful
animation,
illustrating this exponential growth of tag use.
It is no wonder that some analysts are describing folksonomy in terms of hype and fads, but is tagging useful enough to live up to this momentum? Lets look a little closer at what people like about folksonomies. |
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