The term Web 2.0, first coined by Tim O’Reilly back in 2004, describes a cluster of web-based services with a social collaboration and sharing component, where the community as a whole contributes, takes control, votes and ranks content and contributors. Web 2.0 services include social networking sites, wikis, communication tools, weblogs, social bookmarking, podcasts, RSS feeds (and other forms of many-to-many publishing), social software, and folksonomies. Central to this new Web is the idea of tagging — the adding of keywords to a digital object (e.g. a website, picture, audiofile or videoclip) to categorise it. This activity is effectively subject indexing but generally without a controlled vocabulary.

The following list provides examples of sites which include some form of user-based tagging:

Blogs

Technorati: http://technorati.com

Bookmarks

Delicious: http://del.icio.us

Books

Librarything: http://www.librarything.com

Emails

Gmail: http://mail.google.com

Events

GoingToMeet: http://www.goingtomeet.com

People

Tagalag: http://www.tagalag.com

Pictures

Flickr: http://www.flickr.com

Podcasts

Odeo: http://odeo.com

Videos

YouTube: http://www.youtube.com

Tagging of course is not a new concept, especially to librarians, indexers and classification professionals. What is new is that the tagging is being done by everyone, no longer by only a small group of experts, and that the tags are being made public and shared. This is the concept of Folksonomy.

A folksonomy is a user-generated taxonomy used to categorize and retrieve web content such as Web pages, photographs and Web links, using open-ended labels called tags. Typically, folksonomies are Internet-based, but their use may occur in other contexts. The folksonomic tagging is intended to make a body of information increasingly easy to search, discover, and navigate over time. A well-developed folksonomy is ideally accessible as a shared vocabulary that is both originated by, and familiar to, its primary users.

In contrast, in the realm of the Web, taxonomy can be defined as:

the laws or principles of classification;

controlled vocabulary used primarily for the creation of navigation structures for websites

The development of the Internet and the Web, and of search engines, led to users doing their own searching. In the Web 2.0 environment users are now also doing their own content creation and information management.

Because folksonomies develop in Internet-mediated social environments, users can often discover who created a given folksonomy tag, and see the other tags that this person created. In this way, folksonomy users often discover the tag sets of another user who tends to interpret and tag content in a way that makes sense to them. The result is often an immediate and rewarding gain in the user’s capacity to find related content. Part of the appeal of folksonomy is its inherent subversiveness: when faced with the choice of the search tools that Web sites provide, folksonomies can be seen as a rejection of the search engine status quo in favour of tools that are created by the community.

Folksonomy creation and searching tools are not part of the underlying World Wide Web protocols. Folksonomies arise in Web-based communities where special provisions are made at the site level for creating and using tags. These communities are established to enable Web users to label and share user-generated content, such as photographs (e.g. Flickr), or to collaboratively label existing content, such as Web sites (e.g. Technorati), books (e.g. LibraryThing), works in the scientific and scholarly literatures, and blog entries (e.g. WordPress).

Zeit·geist (tsÄ«t’gÄ«st’, zÄ«t’-) n.
The spirit of the time; the taste and outlook characteristic of a period or generation.

Zeitgeist is a term that refers to the ethos of a cohort of people, that spans one or more subsequent generations, who despite their diverse age and socio-economic background experience a certain worldview, which is prevalent at a particular period of socio-cultural progression.

The Web 2.0 trend, as first postulated by Tim O’Reilly, is now being discovered and championed by a new era of internet entrepreneurs. These entrepreneurs and companies have already attracted interest from more established players in the online arena. This is exemplified by Yahoo’s purchase of Del.icio.us, Flickr and Upcoming.org. Sites branded “Web 2.0″ are experiencing phenomenal success on the wave of enthusiasm associated with the social, sharing nature of the new paradigm.

A subset of the Web 2.0 ‘Zeitgeist’ is the concept of Social Bookmarking.

What is it?

Social bookmarking is a popular way to store, classify, share and search links through the practice of tagging them with informal assigned, user-defined keywords that describe their content, and saving these bookmarks to a public website. This is in contrast to the classic idea of bookmarking, which is the practice of saving the website address to your web browser.

To create a collection of social bookmarks, it is necessary to first sign-up to one of the many providers, add tags of your choice and designate whether the bookmark is public or private. Some of these providers periodically verify the links to ensure they are still available and verify users if the URL no longer exists.

Most social bookmarking services allow users to search for bookmarks which are associated with given “tags,” and rank the resources by the number of users which have bookmarked them. Many social bookmarking services also have implemented algorithms to draw inferences from the tag keywords that are assigned to resources by examining the clustering of particular keywords, and the relation of keywords to one another.

Who is doing it?

Social bookmarking websites are now numerous and include, but are not limited to: Del.icio.us, digg, furl, blinklist, blinkbits, blogmarks, reddit, fark, de.lirio.us, newsvine and ma.gnolia.com.

How does it work?

The creator of a bookmark assigns tags to each resource, resulting in a user-defined method of classifying information. Tags are one word descriptors that don’t form a hierarchy and as a result a resource can have as many tags as is necessary, with these tags being modified and deleted as required. So, tagging can be a lot easier and more flexible than fitting your information into preconceived categories or folders.

If you save an article about how to make a certain kind of cake, you can tag it with recipes sweets yogurt or whatever other tags you might use to find it again. You don’t have to rely on the designer of a system to provide you with a category for French cake recipes. You make up tags as you need them, and use the tags that make the most sense to you.

This is a great method for organising data. When someone else also classifies their resource with the same tags the result is a collaborative repository based on similar ideas and creative thoughts. This concept has become known as a “folksonomy”.

Why is it significant?

Social Bookmarking allows different users the opportunity to express different perspectives on the classification of a particular resource. The process also allows like minded individuals to form communities that continue to influence the evolution of folksonomies and common tags for a particular resource. Therefore, using folksonomy tools, relationships between different subjects are created in interesting and previously unrecognised ways. For example, if you are researching television, other users may have seen the connection with video podcasting, taking you to new, potentially valuable directions. These tools also encourage return users as the folksonomy of a particular topic is continually changing and evolving in interesting and exciting directions.

What are the downsides?

By definition, social bookmarking is carried out by amateurs therefore there are no standard set of keywords (also known as controlled vocabulary), no standard for the structure of such tags (e.g. singular vs. plural, capitalisation, etc.), mistagging due to spelling errors, tags that can have more than one meaning, unclear tags due to synonym/antonym confusion, highly unorthodox and “personalised” tag schemas from some users, and no mechanism for users to indicate hierarchical relationships between tags (e.g. a site might be labeled as both sport and rugby, with no mechanism that might indicate that rugby is a subset of sport).

Where is it going?

The shift from formal taxonomies to a folksonomic approach to classification has important implications for how users interact and how communities are developed. As more users come online, more blogs, wikis and other resources are created, this new form of classification will mature, ultimately influcing how information is stored, how those storage engines are designed and developed, and indeed how that information is found.