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.

No, you're not staying up too late, you've got something wrong with your thyroid!

During Small Press Idol, I spent months staying up late, waking up early, etc... Somewhere in the middle of the competition, April or May, I started getting really tired, like I wasn't getting enough sleep (which I wasn't). I thought, well, I've been staying up late and waking up early for months, so I just need to get some sleep, rest up, and I'll be good to go! So, I took the period between rounds 2 and 3 and then between 3 and 4 to catch up on sleep, chores, etc, thinking it would help me feel better... it didn't. During the last handful of months, too, I started to gain an odd amount of weight... I thought to myself, "well, I haven't been eating a lot more, but maybe my metabolism is slowing down or I'm eating more than I thought." Nope...

During SDCC this year, my wife and I gave blood... I get this letter in the mail a couple of weeks later that I got a false positive for something indicating I could have or could end up with leukemia. Since my grandfather died of leukemia, I thought, OH CRAP, and made a quick appointment with my doctor to get things checked out. Barrage of tests later, nope, I'm fine, oh wait, there are some levels off with your thyroid! Hmmm....

Didn't think too much about it, but I did recall that thyroid issues run in my family. The doctor scheduled me for an ultrasound of my thyroid which showed that I have multi-nodular goiters on both sides of my thyroid. The doctor didn't seem too worried but said "just in case" I should get these extra tests done (I'll get back to that "just in case").

Last Thursday and Friday, I got to play Radioactive Man... They gave me this radio-nucleotide pill (radioactive iodine), which was cool because I didn't have to get a radioactive injection instead (phew). They kicked me loose for a few hours and then did some scans... Friday morning, more scans...

Today I found out that there's a bunch of abnormal stuff in the readings, so I just need to find out what my next steps are, but I was told I'm probably going to need to get my thyroid taken out. Some? All? Who knows!

Strangely enough, I was listening to Pink Floyd's Comfortably Numb when my wife called to tell me... Surreal.

Just thought I'd share since people actually do read this thing, I've come to find out!

Well, while you're reading... go check out all of the cool stuff I updated at the Bearded Lady site... Darn it!

Projects, projects, and more projects... more coming?

So, over at the BeardedLadyOnline.com site, we've got a few projects mentioned... well, some of those are going to be getting a lot of wordplay from us in the coming weeks... We're actually going to start doing web comics, too!

First to be mentioned... Capetown Chronicles... Part 1: Just a Cup of Coffee...

After some of the buzz surrounding the story, perhaps for its sheer vulgarity, I'm not sure, we've decided to share the story in the coming weeks and follow it up with some more installments, all on the web!

The page just shows a sample, so be prepared, there's a lot more coming... Roger is just working to get some more life in the pages. You'll see!

Go to the Bearded Lady Comics section of the site here and click on "Capetown Chronicles"...

Enjoy!

thanks,
Erik
erik@beardedladyonline.com
http://www.beardedladyonline.com
http://thelastbardsblog.blogspot.com