I Say Folksonomies, You Say Freetagging

March 31st, 2005

A wonderful post from Dan Brown titled On Freetagging where he discusses the difference between the term folksonomies and freetagging:

“Freetagging – applying freely-chosen words as labels to objects – is the activity that leads to a folksonomy. When you type tags into del.icio.us, you’re freetagging. My preference for freetagging comes from looking at what makes the activity valuable: the process itself. A folksonomy is an ever-growing vocabulary that is internally inconsistent (out of necessity). The value is not in its content or structure, but in how its generated.”

So, freetagging leads to folksonomies. I can get behind that theory, although I’m not into arguing about semantics (you might say I’m anti-semantic - heh)

The most useful part of the post, at least in my work, is when he creates a chart defining the differences between folksonomies and controlled vocabularies. (scroll down in his post)

I only disagree with his use of the term ‘proprietary’ to define folksonomies. I think that tags are shared and not owned by anyone. Having tags as proprietary schema defeats the purpose of a true folksonomic system, which is shared and collaborative. Controlled vocabularies are also shared among users, so I don’t feel the need to distinguish the two in that respect. They are both shared among groups.

A great post by Dan. Make sure to read the whole thing.

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