Folksonomy and a Taxonomy

Have you ever been a little bit curious about what the whole folksonomy versus taxonomy thing was all about? Well, I wasn't so much, it seemed pretty cut and dry when I read about it in a class I'm taking right now on Web 2.0, but I did get a little more information out of it than I thought!

Taxonomy is the old school way of categorizing things. Much like creatures on the planet, with genus, species, sub-species, etc, Taxonomy categorizes by taking a higher level category and making it more and more granular until you hit the item in question. Take music, for example. Say you would like to categorize the band Metallica. You would put it in Music, Rock, Metal, Heavy Metal, Thrash Metal, and then it would be alphabetical by "M" for Metallica. If you haven't tried it before, go to Yahoo and try to find any band or any movie just by clicking through categories.

Folksonomy, on the other hand, is all about tags instead of categories. You may throw tags on a web site, making things easily searchable with a search engine. This even works to the level of certain web sites. Photo web sites do have conventional categories, but they also have tags, allowing you to bypass a specific classification, pigeon-holing the photo, and calling it what it is. A photo of a celebrity, like Matt Bellamy, could have tags such as "Muse", "Matt Bellamy", "band", "music", "Custom Guitars", etc... Each of those would find pictures that fall into that tag including, conveniently, the one you tagged. What's the benefit of this? Well, on a lot of sites, people can tag others' photos, posts, etc, to relate them to other people, paces, things, sites, whatever. So if I take a picture of a group of people and post it on FaceBook, for example, tagging three people I know who I took the picture of, someone else might come along, see the picture, and tag several other people, etc. How do you think sites like Ancestry.com manage to work so well? It's a combination of individuals entering in their own personal data and random people finding relations they may not have known about.

Bottom line, though... The two are related in the sense that you end up loosely categorizing things using folksonomy, but how things are "categorized" in folksonomy isn't necessarily in a way you could call it taxonomy.

Clear that up?

folksonomy and a taxonomy.