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Following the recent growth-spike in social software systems like del.icio.us and flickr (systems that support the use of tags to classify content and to then share those tag schemes with others) has been the use of the term folksonomy to describe these tag-based taxonomies.

Personally, I find a lesser-used term, tagsonomy, more appropriate.

Of course, these recent 'net-based systems aren't the first place that I've run into on-the-fly creation of tags to help classify content.

I believe I have various tagsonomies now in effect in a number of places, including at least the following:

[Some may object that the tags used in systems that manage purely private content (e.g., Outlook categories) cannot be considered true folksonomies, since neither the content nor the tags are visible to anyone but myself. That may be true, and is maybe the root difference between folksonomy and tagsonomy. However, my guess, without having (yet) studied the patterns/structures in tags used across the different systems, some private some public, is that my informal tagging systems probably bear more similarities than differences. They probably all reflect to a significant extent my particular way of viewing the world.]

I have been quite intrigued with the exploration that del.icio.us lets one do by browsing not only who else is bookmarking the same content you are, but also seeing how they have tagged the same links...in some cases, there is quite a bit of diversity! And then when you see someone else with a similar tagsonomy, you think, hey, they must think in some way like me.

I realize that the simple, informal, ad-hoc nature of these tag-based classifications is a feature, yet I am unable to avoid thinking that there may be a way to, without diminishing those properties, somehow do a better job of managing at least my own global tagsonomy as it grows and evolves. By manage it, I mostly mean do something special to help make the tags more consistent across my own content. The anticipated benefit will be better searchability across my own content. And beyond that, some better means for discovering related content elsewhere on the web.

Next step (if I had the time) would be to build a tool that harvests all the tags from these decentralized tagsonomies, and presents them to me in some unified way. This would be a nice little sem-webbish python project, I recall seeing python libs for del.icio.us and flickr, I can use win32com for the com-based apps, I'll have to explore to see what some of the other apps provide in the way of exposure or api.