Folksonomies: A User-Driven Approach to Organizing Content

In Folksonomies: A User-Driven Approach to Organizing Content, Joshua Porter (User Interface Engineering) compares taxonomies—“they are very expensive to create and maintain…may fail to reflect the language of users”—to folksonomies. Porter writes: “One of the most promising features of folksonomies is that there is no disconnect between the user’s words and the words on the site: the users words are the words on the site! Not only are users able to organize their stuff according to their own rules, but the information architects of the site can learn interesting things that a taxonomy may not have illuminated.”

Learn more about folksonomies.