What is Folksonomy

Schools need to stop teaching the Dewey Decimal System and start empowering our students with folksonomy. Understanding folksonomy is critical in order to adapt and survive in the "New Read/Write Web 2.0". The folksonomy revolution is pushing this current "Social Web2.0" into the "Semantic Web3.0." This new classifying phenomenon has reformed the way users organize, share, search, and label their digital pictures ( flickr), bookmarks (delicious), and videos (youtube) collections.

Folksonomy, folk + taxonomy, is a new way to organize and label information using tags. Tags are keywords that give meta data, data about the data, which enable classification. Furthermore, folksonomies are social and collaborative because they use "cooperative classification and communication" that builds a collective intelligence for users to contribute and tap into. A better way to define folksonomy is to explain what is not.

*Non-binary: With folksonomy, you can apply multiple tags to data rather than choosing just one category to file under.

*Non-hierarchical: Instead of top down folders and sub folders, tags are organized in tag clouds where the more popular a tag the bigger the size. The following picture is an example tag cloud surrounding the concept of Web2.0.