Folksonomy Excitement

Folksonomy is defined as

<blockquote>. . .a neologism (a new word or expression) for a practice of collaborative categorization using freely chosen keywords. This feature began appearing in a variety of social software in 2004. Some examples of online Folksonomy being social bookmarking sites like De.licio.us and Jots which are bookmark sharing sites, Flickr, for photo sharing, 43 Things, for goal sharing, GenieLab, for music recommendations and associations, and Tagsurf, for tag-based discussions. Gmail's labeling system is somewhat similar to then.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folksonomy </blockquote>

No one has ever accused me of having a lack of enthusiasm, but things are reaching a whole new level.  I heard about Delicious and a few other social bookmarking programs some time ago.  Just as happened with blogging  initially, it looked okay, but nothing to set the world on fire.  Enter Blogger…some time passes, and I have an overpowering desire to put categories in my blog(s) on Blogger, and finally did accomplish that, as you know if you’ve been a) reading this blog and b) looking at my left sidebar at all.  Ok, so mission accomplished, and I’ve been waiting to see what topic would present itself next for my attention.  I didn’t have to wait long.  First came the desire to create a personal start page, which I accomplished this weekend. Then came a greater curiosity about Folksonomy (aka social bookmarking; aka “tagging”). I use the term “greater”, because as you know if you’ve read this blog for any length of time, I had a consuming desire to use De.licio.us to create categories here, which of course has been accomplished fairly recently.  I enjoy using De.licio.us enough that I created an additional account to store pages/tags from interesting encounters on the Internet. I use my main account for tags relating to categories for my blogs, and for The Handicapped Computerist where I am a contributor and all around template tweaker.

I became more curious about social bookmarking sites/engines/tools, such as Furl and Delicious, and wanted to see if I could find others. I did a search on Google, and found almost a score of other such sites.  Some of them are for academics, and they have somewhat differing features, and most of them look interesting. So, I will review one of these sites in detail each week. You can see the list I’ve gathered in the left sidebar; if you know of others, please drop me a note or comment and tell me what they are so that I can review those also.  Stay tuned!