Folksonomy folktales

The second way that folksonomies can be extremely useful is as a research resource into the interests and language of users and communities. It would be similar to searching log analysis, but user-generated tags represent a level of categorization higher than simple search terms.

One particularly powerful example is using user-generated tags for developing faceted navigation schemas. For example, close to 80 percent of tags on sites like Flickr (flickr.com) fall into one of a few facets—thing, place, event and people are the most common.

In conclusion, folksonomies should never have been compared with taxonomies, thesauri or ontologies. The comparison is essentially bogus because folksonomies are not a classification system at all. Popularity is not a semantic structure.

Perhaps the most fundamental limit of folksonomies for future "revolutionary" impact is that there is no mechanism to improve the quality of the individual tags that is consistent with their most powerful characteristic, ease of use. I just don’t see flocks of users going back and re-tagging; in fact many sites don’t allow it.

And so, the second conclusion is that folksonomies are interesting but not really very revolutionary. User tagging has been around for a long time, and the relationship between free keyword tagging and classification schema or taxonomies has been and will continue to be a dialogue in which hybrid systems will almost always be the best answer.

The future of folksonomies lies not with the revolutionary rhetoric, which actually detracts from the real value of folksonomies, but with a range of new and interesting ways to combine user-generated tags and taxonomies. True, those new hybrid systems of taxonomy/classification schema and folksonomy won’t satisfy the anti-authoritarian strain of thought that runs through folksonomy literature, but they will ultimately deliver much more value to many more people in many more environments than pure folksonomy applications ever will.