Web democracy – live free and tag stuff

Folksonomy is one of those weirdly out-of-place terms on the web. Online culture usually doesn’t support the formality of a definition rooted in Greek and sounding so academic. It certainly doesn’t sound like a typical internet-born word – a down-to-business acronym, or a half-nonsensical word beginning with ‘e’ or ‘I’.

In fairness, it actually refers to something called tagging, so I guess that’s probably why not many have heard of the formal term. Heck, I’m not sure how many people are really aware of tagging itself (not the graffiti kind of tagging, though remarkably similar in principle). Like learning how to right-click a mouse or use email, I think it’s a task people just learn and absorb into regular routine that it’s second nature.

And if it’s not yet second nature, it’s because you haven’t become a regular user of any of the following sites. I think once you give them a try just once, you may just be hooked into a whole new way to interact with the web (the 2.0 way).

Del.icio.us – this is a website that lets you build, manage and share bookmarks. Instead of having your favourite sites chained to your browser, where you can only access them from your own computer, a site like del.icio.us lets you log in and view your bookmarks from anywhere. It also lets you share them with other people. The best thing about this ‘new’ way to bookmark is that you can assign tags – intuitive words that help you categorize and lump similar sites together. And, you can assign (‘tag’) a site or page with any number of tags. Come across a website featuring the latest mullet styles, as well as blog on the topic? Well, you can tag the site any way you choose, but I’d recommend ‘mullet’, ‘blog’, and ‘weird’.

Digg.com – this is a user-driven content website. You can read any number of articles, indexed by topic and voted on by users. Like something? Digg it (same as ‘tag it’). Don’t love something or consider something to be spam? Bury it. If enough people agree, it will be buried!

Flickr is a photo-sharing site. Last.fm is an online radio. Wikipedia is, of course, the largest example and an extremely popular encyclopedia. Facebook is a people networking site. They’re all examples of sites that are driven by users’ input (photos, music, personal information, written passages, news stories, blog entries, videos, you name it) and categorized by those same users so you can actually find what you’re looking for by topic.

The whole concept of tagging content is actually one of the fundamental pillars of web 2.0. There is a tremendous amount of information on hundreds of millions of websites that anyone can create and serve to the masses. It’s both a liberating feeling to be able to control the content you see and share, and it’s reassuring to know that several million people are helping to contribute to cleaning up the vast mess that current exists online.

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