For the uninitiated, "Taxis" means "Classification" and "Nomos" (or "Nomia") means "Management". "Folk" are people. So "Folksonomy" literally means "People's Classification Management".
Some people might argue why "Folksonomy" does not mean "People's Management" and if you are one of those, you might want to join your friends who are debating "Folksonomy" vs "Folks Taxonomy".
Lets forget the etymological nitty-gritties for a while and focus on what this new buzz-word actually means. To completely understand the need of this concept and its significance, you would need a crash course in the history of the famous ( or infamous ) "Search Wars".
Once upon a time, there was a company called "Microsoft" that had the largest share in the retail software space. The ruler of "Microsoft", "Billie Wille Gates" was very happy with his dominance in the retail software space, but he had a bigger ambition - the ambition to dominate the lives of all computer users on this planet called "Earth" ( he never cared about Martians though ). It didn't take him time to figure out that "Internet Search" was an activity he should indulge in to get closer to his ambition. During the same time, a couple of underdogs dropped out of Stanford and built a search engine that would put other search engines out of business. The company called itself "Google" ( after the magical number googol ) and [coincidentally] also called their search engine "Google".
The fairy tale doesn't end here. Having rapped "Microsoft" hard on the back of its head, "Google" went on to become the leaders in the online search space and built a set of businesses around it that would make it very profitable. Meantime, another company called "Amazon", that was into selling books online, got interested in internet search as well and jumped into the fray. "Yahoo!", the undisputed leader of search engines prior to the "Google" onslaught, also set out to take vengeance on those tresspassing into its holy grail. All of these companies had a common motive - to build a better search engine than the other, one that would draw all the people using the internet every single day.
The million dollar question is - what makes a search engine better than the other ? There are several million pages out on the internet that need to be searched and given that there is no definitive "best" answer to this problem, how do you quantify the "goodness" of a search engine ? Is it just the speed at which the search engine crunches through the results that counts or are there other factors that impact its "goodness" ?
As you might have figured out by now, there is no good answer to this question. Umm, yeah, I would like the search results faster, but what if the links that I am looking for are on the 10th page of the search results ? I would much prefer a search engine that takes 5 seconds more to return the results, but gets me the results that I want on the first page. If you were to ask a million internet users of their expectations from a search engine, I bet you would get the same response. Personalization of the results is the top priority and the performance is a close second.
So, the million dollar question changes to "How do you get every search user results that he/she cares about ?" What it really means is that if two people search for the keyword "bull", a finance guy should get links pertaining to wall street whereas a basketball fan should get links pertaining to Chicago Bulls. What it really means is that to be the undisputed market leader, you have to go the last mile and personalize the search results for every single user who performs a search and at the same time personalize it better than all the other search engines.
Ok, so now that you have had a crash course in "Search Wars", what do you think is the answer to this complex problem ? I'm afraid I still have to say - there is no good answer to this problem. But that does not mean there hasn't been progress. Each one of the companies that starred in the "Search Wars" have research teams setup that attempt to crack this problem before the other team does, and the latest solution they are playing with is "Folksonomy".
"Folksonomy" is a neologism for a practice of collaborative categorization using freely chosen keywords. More colloquially, this refers to a group of people cooperating spontaneously to organize information into categories.
Think of it as a circle of friends - if you were to ask your friends to list out the URLs that interest them, there is a high probability that you would find those URLs interesting. Now think about what would happen if everyone in your friends circle shares the URLs that they find interesting - you would easily be sitting on heap of information that interested you but that you did not know about.
Now think about what would happen if everyone on the internet lists out the URLs that interest them. Well, you don't personally know all of them so that is where the extrapolation meets a sudden death. What if, in addition to a list of all the URLs in this world that people care about, you also had the details of how those people are related to each other, you could build communities on the internet that belong to people who share similar interests. Given that you would never know the relationship between all the people on the internet ( nevermind the concept of six degrees of separation ), what if you used a common set of URLs between two people to simulate a relationship and then built communities around these relationships. That is exactly what "Folksonomy" is all about - figuring out common interests and building a community around it. And since it is the users that are organizing this information, advocates of "Folksonomy" believe that it is a better model to store all the information in this world.
How well it would do, only time would tell, but companies like "Yahoo!" and "TagCloud" are already building some interesting pieces to bring this concept to reality. There will soon be a day when the search engines would be able to tell me which of the several billion earthlings should be my friends.
Some people might argue why "Folksonomy" does not mean "People's Management" and if you are one of those, you might want to join your friends who are debating "Folksonomy" vs "Folks Taxonomy".
Lets forget the etymological nitty-gritties for a while and focus on what this new buzz-word actually means. To completely understand the need of this concept and its significance, you would need a crash course in the history of the famous ( or infamous ) "Search Wars".
Once upon a time, there was a company called "Microsoft" that had the largest share in the retail software space. The ruler of "Microsoft", "Billie Wille Gates" was very happy with his dominance in the retail software space, but he had a bigger ambition - the ambition to dominate the lives of all computer users on this planet called "Earth" ( he never cared about Martians though ). It didn't take him time to figure out that "Internet Search" was an activity he should indulge in to get closer to his ambition. During the same time, a couple of underdogs dropped out of Stanford and built a search engine that would put other search engines out of business. The company called itself "Google" ( after the magical number googol ) and [coincidentally] also called their search engine "Google".
The fairy tale doesn't end here. Having rapped "Microsoft" hard on the back of its head, "Google" went on to become the leaders in the online search space and built a set of businesses around it that would make it very profitable. Meantime, another company called "Amazon", that was into selling books online, got interested in internet search as well and jumped into the fray. "Yahoo!", the undisputed leader of search engines prior to the "Google" onslaught, also set out to take vengeance on those tresspassing into its holy grail. All of these companies had a common motive - to build a better search engine than the other, one that would draw all the people using the internet every single day.
The million dollar question is - what makes a search engine better than the other ? There are several million pages out on the internet that need to be searched and given that there is no definitive "best" answer to this problem, how do you quantify the "goodness" of a search engine ? Is it just the speed at which the search engine crunches through the results that counts or are there other factors that impact its "goodness" ?
As you might have figured out by now, there is no good answer to this question. Umm, yeah, I would like the search results faster, but what if the links that I am looking for are on the 10th page of the search results ? I would much prefer a search engine that takes 5 seconds more to return the results, but gets me the results that I want on the first page. If you were to ask a million internet users of their expectations from a search engine, I bet you would get the same response. Personalization of the results is the top priority and the performance is a close second.
So, the million dollar question changes to "How do you get every search user results that he/she cares about ?" What it really means is that if two people search for the keyword "bull", a finance guy should get links pertaining to wall street whereas a basketball fan should get links pertaining to Chicago Bulls. What it really means is that to be the undisputed market leader, you have to go the last mile and personalize the search results for every single user who performs a search and at the same time personalize it better than all the other search engines.
Ok, so now that you have had a crash course in "Search Wars", what do you think is the answer to this complex problem ? I'm afraid I still have to say - there is no good answer to this problem. But that does not mean there hasn't been progress. Each one of the companies that starred in the "Search Wars" have research teams setup that attempt to crack this problem before the other team does, and the latest solution they are playing with is "Folksonomy".
"Folksonomy" is a neologism for a practice of collaborative categorization using freely chosen keywords. More colloquially, this refers to a group of people cooperating spontaneously to organize information into categories.
Think of it as a circle of friends - if you were to ask your friends to list out the URLs that interest them, there is a high probability that you would find those URLs interesting. Now think about what would happen if everyone in your friends circle shares the URLs that they find interesting - you would easily be sitting on heap of information that interested you but that you did not know about.
Now think about what would happen if everyone on the internet lists out the URLs that interest them. Well, you don't personally know all of them so that is where the extrapolation meets a sudden death. What if, in addition to a list of all the URLs in this world that people care about, you also had the details of how those people are related to each other, you could build communities on the internet that belong to people who share similar interests. Given that you would never know the relationship between all the people on the internet ( nevermind the concept of six degrees of separation ), what if you used a common set of URLs between two people to simulate a relationship and then built communities around these relationships. That is exactly what "Folksonomy" is all about - figuring out common interests and building a community around it. And since it is the users that are organizing this information, advocates of "Folksonomy" believe that it is a better model to store all the information in this world.
How well it would do, only time would tell, but companies like "Yahoo!" and "TagCloud" are already building some interesting pieces to bring this concept to reality. There will soon be a day when the search engines would be able to tell me which of the several billion earthlings should be my friends.
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