User Interface Engineering presents a nice post from Joshua Portar of Bokardo titled Folksonomies: A User-Driven Approach to Organizing Content.

Nothing new but a few phrases to notice about the pros that folksonomies have in respect to taxonomies

Folksonomies…addresses two of the most difficult problems with taxonomies.

First:

The information within folksonomies is organized and maintained by users, so very little work has to be done by designers after initially setting up the tagging system. This could be a boon to information architects who now spend too much of their time regularly re-organizing their taxonomy.

Then:

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.

Anyway, we’re still at the beginning with taxonomies:

there are many questions left to answer about them. Perhaps the most interesting question is how to apply them to an existing site….. it’s not immediately clear how a corporate site, financial site, or shopping site might make use of the same organizational scheme…..so testing the folksonomic waters might be a welcome research opportunity.

In the same category:

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 28th, 2005 at 12:41 am and is filed under Information Architecture, External Articles, Joshua Porter. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.