folksonomies

My first thought this week is that Kroski's
article is amazing. As I was reading through the positive points about folksonomies and tagging, I kept thinking, "Yes, but...", and then when I got to the latter part of the piece, most of my objections were accounted for.

It was very interesting this week reading further into the pros and cons of tagging and folksonomies. As in last week's post, I remain intrigued by the way folksonomies can be a great complement to controlled classification methods, balancing out each other's weaknesses with their own unique strengths. In refuting the disadvantages of folksonomies in The Hive Mind: Folksonomies and User-Based Tagging, Kroski in many cases transforms the weaknesses of folksonomies into strengths.

First off, I found the that the
readings this week filled my head with all sorts of different thoughts on what
folksonomies are and their usefulness, and some big words were thrown in for
good measure (Kroski talks about ‘ontology’ and I nearly fell out of my chair).
So, after reading the articles and looking elsewhere for some definitions, I
have come up with my own definition for what ‘folksonomy’ means (with thanks to
Kroski and Funk and Wagnalls):

After reading through this week’s material a few things come to mind. First of all, as Ellyssa Kroski explains, folksonomies won’t replace LC classification for traditional libraries. But since the web would be impossible to classify in this traditional way, folksonomies are pretty handy. What they lose out on in hierarchical searching, they make up for by simply getting the job done.

When looking at the title for this weeks topic I really did not have any clue what it would be about. So everything this week has been completely new to me, but I found it to be an interesting topic to read up on. I really like the idea of Folksonomies, where everyone can equally create a classification scheme about a topic through the use of tagging. I like that, instead of people at the topic forcing taxonomies on people, people can now decide how a topic, subject or whatnot is classified in their own terms.

The more I read about folksonomies, the more I think that there is a definite place for them in the library. The experts no longer reign supreme, as Ellysa Kroski points out in The Hive Mind: Folksonomies and User-Based Tagging.