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What Proponents Love about Folksonomies
Introduction
Definitions
A Short History
What Proponents Love
What Detractors Hate
Flickr: a Tool for the Individual
Del.icio.us: a Tool for the Many
Tagging ≠ Library Classification
Fun with Folksonomies
The Future
Conclusion
References
Email

Folksonomies:

  • are easy for people to participate in.
  • encourage natural language with room for subtleties.
  • include people in a community activity.
  • provide immediate feedback.
  • encourage serendipity.
  • create order where there was none before.  
  • are inexpensive in a way that classification done by trained experts cannot be.  

Personal Benefit, Flexible Language, Feedback

People use folksonomies because they can see the immediate benefit to themselves.13  If you tag a favourite photo, you can find it again much quicker than scanning through all of the photos you've stored online.  Because there are no categories, hierarchies, or controlled terms, there is no learning curve.14  It is easy to label an item with the terms that make the most sense to you.    Without restrictive terms, language is more fluid, and subtleties can be maintained without "signal loss".15  One well-known example is the difference between the terms  film, movies, and cinema.16  There are meaningful distinctions presented by the choice of one term over the other, although most classification systems would consider them synonyms.  Once a photo or a webpage is tagged, a person can connect to everything else that has been given the same tag on the system (website, community), and can learn from and interact with this information.17  

Serendipitous Browsing

While folksonomies help individuals find items that they tagged themselves, they do not offer exact recall to general users that professional classification systems aspire towards.  Some fans of folksonomies prefer the system this way.18  They enjoy the serendipity of tagged terms, and the fun of discovery browsing through the variety of responses that may come up.19  

Inexpensiveness

Proponents of folksonomy are quick to point out that professional classification cannot keep up with the speed of new information on the internet.  There is no way that enough time, money, and trained specialists could be found to keep on top of the web.  As Clay Shirky discusses,

“The advantage of folksonomies isn’t that they’re better than controlled vocabularies, it’s that they’re better than nothing, because controlled vocabularies are not extensible to the majority of cases where tagging is needed.” 20

Even if there were no other attractions to folksonomies, they should not be compared to a system that is unable to meet these needs.    
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