Folksonomies: A Conceptual Examination
How Folksonomies Can Solve the Problematic Limitations Traditionally Associated with Taxonomies.
In this digital age, nobody even remotely involved in the field of information management would be able to deny the significance of a well-conceived, well-executed taxonomy. After all, there's still nothing more efficient than a good taxonomy to keep one's data findable.
However, as content grows over time and becomes increasingly miscellaneous, the inherent limitations of a hierarchical taxonomy become obviously problematic. Often one will come across a situation were something can belong to two or more groups. Take the classic film Alien, for example: would one classify it primarily as "science fiction" or as "horror"? Clearly, a case could be made for both. Frankly, I usually find overlapping sets far more fitting than hierarchies.
The chief problem the traditional approach should be immediately obvious: Each individual user accessing information brings a different set of organizational criteria to the mix, as each of us associates information slightly differently. If you're like me, and I know I am, you've neatly organized your iPod's musical library by a complex variety of genres and sub-genres, artists, ratings etc. Of course the personalized taxonomy I use would be quite difficult for the uninitiated to navigate, as it is based on much contextual subject-specific information. And therein lays the problem of the taxonomy: lack of contextual data.
Folksonomies as a Solution
This is where Folksonomies come in. An environment as information-rich as the world wide web, containing so much miscellaneous data, could not possibly be structured as a taxonomy. Rather than being planned, the web evolves as an emergent dynamic, users constantly adding associative, descriptive metadata. Thus, the collective information architecture of the web becomes far more anthropomorphic than a traditional taxonomy.
Anthropomorphic?
When I say "anthropomorphic", what I mean is that the way bits of data are connected by association, be it from people linking to other sites, commenting on blogposts or adding descriptive meta-tags to their pages, makes the structure resemble the way we associate information in our own minds, usually by contextual experience. On the web, the traditionally accepted rules of memetics are even more applicable than even Susan Blackmore could have imagined when she formulated them in her classic "The Meme Machine". Just as genes are passed from one generation of organisms to the next; memes are passed from one human mind to another.
The Web: A Memeplex
As the home computer spread across the globe and became inextricably wired into the Internet's extelligence, the ultimate environment for the propagation of memes was created: the world wide web. And so, through what can only be equated with a form of natural evolution, the folksonomy of the web has become the greatest memeplex of all time.
More meta-information means more complex memeplexes. More complex memeplexes mean better findability. One day, by adding meta comments, users will be able to more directly influence the perceived relevance of a web page, and thus how findable it is.
