When seeing that the topic of the readings this week were folksonomies and tagging, my first thought was "What the heck is a folksonomy??" I was well aware of tagging, but folksonomies were a complete mystery to me. Before I even started the article on it I will admit I Googled the term first to get a basic definition. From what I gathered a folksonomy is essentially social bookmarking/tagging. As I ventured on to read the article by Wichowski, I saw a quote from David Weinberger in the section on scholarly response that really seemed to sum it all up. “The old way creates a tree. The new rakes leaves together.” Tagging creates a collection of subjects for one person, however folksonomies/social tagging bring each persons collection of subjects together and allows them to interact about them.
Although reading both articles gave me a good idea of what social tagging was, I thought the only way to understand it fully was to explore a social tagging website. Since both articles mentioned delicious.com I decided that was the one to go with. I wasn't really sure what to expect, but from what I gathered people add different tags to their stacks. From there you can click on the tag to see what articles are included in that tag and view the other people that also follow that tag. Definitely an interesting concept, although not sure it particularly appeals to me.
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