Folksonomizer: generic folksonomy service


Just read a post on Paolo Massa’s Blog, where he requests to add a Flickr/ del.icio.us/ Technorati style of tagging to Webjay music playlists. In hip speak this practice is called a “folksonomy“.

Folksonomy is a neologism for a practice of collaborative categorization using simple tags. This feature has begun appearing in a variety of social software. At present, the best examples of online folksonomies are social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, a bookmark sharing site, Flickr, for photo sharing, 43 Things, for goal sharing, and Tagsurf, for tag-based discussions.
(from wikipedia.org)

Strictly speaking, this would be a 4th way of organising stuff, somewhere between a taxonomy (categorized) and searchable (indexed). It’s not a taxonomy because one item can have multiple free-text tags, and it’s not straightforward indexing, because it is information ‘outside’ the item (meta-information), and not part of it.

When I was thinking about how Lucas should implement this, I found it a pity that Webjay has to re-develop something that already exists in other services. Or, the other way around, it would be great to have a service that does ONLY that: add folksonomy support to just about anything. Let’s call it ‘www.folksonomizer.new‘. It would look something like this:

💬 Web2.0