Folksonomies vs. Taxonomy

When we use social bookmarking services, we are helping to create a new way of organizing information to be used for research. In my cataloguing course we are learning about the importance of standard rules for organization to ensure access, yet social bookmarking is, as Richardson says, “run by millions of amateurs with no real training in classification”. There is clearly great potential for chaos in this kind of organization, although some argue that tagging allows us to see the way others interpret the information we are using, that participation is easy and that tagging data is helpful as new ways to find information. Folksonomies Tap People Power is a short but informative article about folksonomies created by tagging.