Month: August 2005

The rise in social networks and their power over the information on the Internet has sprung another phenomenon: “Folksonomies”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folksonomy. Folksonomy is a word coined by “Thomas Vander Wal”:http://www.vanderwal.net/about.php, an online pioneer studying information structure and combines the words ‘taxonomy’ with ‘folks’. A simple definition is that folksonomies are classifications defined by people. The implications of folksonomies are much more complex.
In the beginning of folksonomies, collaborative tagging efforts by people were simple. If you posted an entry on your blog about marketing, you would classify it marketing, if you were writing on knitting, you would classify it knitting. However, with the popularity of social software like “del.icio.us”:http://del.icio.us, “Flickr”:http://www.flickr.com and the blog search engine “Technorati”:http://www.technorati.com growing, tagging systems have become much more complex and layered. Now, if you post an entry on your blog about marketing, you might classify it as “marketing, online, emarketing, collaborative” in order to encompass a more defined description of your post.
How does this effect your business blog, then? Online marketing includes the ability to tie into these social networks. What is the sense of posting to a blog that nobody reads? In order to increase traffic, you have to interact effectively with the blogosphere. Tagging is one of the ways to do this.