taxonomy

Folksonomy, or ‘folks' and ‘taxonomy', has come to mean "non-hierarchical ontology created as a natural result of user-added metadata or tagging."

Reading through various articles on the subject, I have no conclusions as to how I feel about it.  Rather, I believe there are bits of good and bits of bad.

Here's why;

Folksonomy represents current trends in language and classification. It is the most up-to-date version of the LCA (Library of Congress Authority) one can find.

The Nature Publishing Group remarks, "Just as long as those hyperlinks (or let's call them plain old links) are managed, tagged, commented upon, and published onto the Web, they represent a user's own personal library placed on public record, which - when aggregated with other personal libraries - allows for rich, social networking opportunities." Where there was once (and still is) search engine territory, now exists a dynamic bookmarking service for online collaboration and shared taxonomy of web information.