Librarian Way

Library clips posted a great overview and collection of links in the blog entry
Social bookmarks so far.

Note to self: Read about Folksonomy on Wikipedia. I have not heard about this in library school, but it appears to be something I need to know about, considering my interest in digital libraries and Web-based library access. A poster on the Web4Lib list mentioned adding folksonomy support to Drupal.

[Modified: 4/7/05: The way I understand this is that when I tag my Weblog entries with subject headings that make sense to me, and which I may have seen used for similar entries on other weblogs, I am using a folksonomy. It is informal classification. Thomas Vander Wal, the person who coined this term, has written about the difference between broad and narrow folksonomies in his weblog: Folksonomy :: Off the Top :: vanderwal.net He also praises Bruce Stirling’s article in Wired magazine. Sterling writes, “Folksonomy emerges from a combination of two inventions: (1) machines that can automate at least some of what it takes to classify information and (b) social software that makes users willing to do at least some of the work for nothing. You’ll notice that 1 and b don’t really go together. Folksonomy is like that. A pinch of free work and a peck of mechanical sorting will get you from 1 to b.“

Many2Many has a visual graph of how the term ‘folksonomy’ relates to other terms, such as taxonomy and metadata: Visualizing the collective brain.]

[I went against my own rules and deleted the rest of this because it was not applicable to the topic. It was just my thinking out loud ramblings.]