FridayBlowout

You’ve heard of Web 2.0 folksonomies but what are they, exactly? How do they contribute to the quality of content on the Web and how can they be recognized? Here, we examine Web 2.0 folksonomies, the changes that brought them to life and the changes that they have contributed online.

What is a folksonomy?

Folksonomy is the method of creating tags used to categorize and annotate content through collaborative efforts. It began to emerge in 2004 when software applications started to accommodate social sharing and other activities. This was evidenced in the creation of sites that encouraged social bookmarking, social networking and content annotation.

Folksonomy came to be associated with Web 2.0 because by its nature, it encouraged collaboration and participation in online activities. Tagging content and data also became prevalent, with the purpose of making it easier for users to look for information, edit it and share it. Folksonomy is almost exclusively used to refer to tags produced through social activities.

Folksonomy is known by several names, including social tagging, social indexing, collaborative tagging and social classification.

Uses of Web 2.0 folksonomies

There are many uses for folksonomies in a Web 2.0 environment, which explains their popularity.  Folksonomies are used to create information that is easy to look for and find on the Internet. As content develops and expands, folksonomies also help make this content easy to navigate. Folksonomies also make content familiar to users, primarily because they usually originate from the same source pool. Folksonomy makes it possible for end users to access user-generated content.

Folksonomies also help users communicate or at least get to know other users. Since a user creates a folksonomy tag when contributing Web content, other users can find out who this user is, based on that tag. His other tags may also be discovered. This helps users within the same environment get in touch with one another or at least find out each other’s activities. Furthermore, this helps users find content that is related to their interest or work.

Folksonomies in the Web 2.0 environment has made it possible for users like us to access free resources and
information, such as content, books, scholarly literature, scientific journals, blog entries and annotated media files.

Folksonomies are most often found online although it can also be used in some offline resources.

Limitations of Web 2.0 folksonomies

Without Web 2.0 technology, it’s quite difficult to imagine the existence of folksonomies. Data tagging has
brought so much potential to the Web that it has created a phenomenon that has completely changed many of the concepts and established models we have been so used to. However, there are challenges to folksonomies that may need to be addressed soon. Some of its limitations include:

No control over terminologies. There is a danger that allowing freely annotated and distributed content can
produce inconsistency and unreliability. Over a period of time, tags for a single concept (synonyms), a single
tag with multiple meanings (homonymy) and a single tag for several different but related meanings (polysemy) might emerge. This might lead to the problem of inefficiency in terms of content search and indexing. Meta noise, which refers to tags that are irrelevant and imprecise, might also increase.

And then there is a danger that, in a Web 2.0 environment where users come together to collaborate on the same interest, biases might emerge. This is because people with the same tendencies and preferences when using classification methods might encourage one another to propagate these biases. As a result, the objective view of content might suffer. In Web 2.0 folksonomies, ambiguity might occur and become prevalent.

Here is where this lesson ends for today. We really hope you enjoyed this lesson too.

You will receive the next lesson in 7 days. Next week’s lesson will have the following title:

“Web 2.0 and User-Generated Content: Productive Partnership”

Copyright(C) 2008 by John Delavera & Reimund Lube

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