Understanding Folksonomy: Catalyzing Users to Enrich Information

The notion of folksonomies, categorizations that bubble up from readers rather than taxonomies produced by experts, has been catching on slowly over the past few years. More recently, however, folksonomies and tagging seem to be growing very rapidly. Tag clouds now cover the horizon of thousands of web sites, and they operate at the heart of many Web 2.0 sites.Thomas Vander Wal understands how to create, use, and deploy folksonomies. He coined the word, but more than that, he's been helping businesses apply this technology to their projects for the last few years. He presents the formal understandings behind classification in more familiar web-based contexts, showing how to create more flexible structures that users wants to support. Why would users want to spend time tagging? Because, done right, tagging and folksonomies help people find things again. Users can come back to their own work, and find things other people thought were similar. It's a virtuous circle, where helping yourself helps other people whose helping themselves helps you. Making this work means understanding user psychology, design, and the interactions between tags and other ways of finding things. Vander Wal explains everything you'll need to get started and shows how to make simple tagging solve complicated problems.