Dan Brown puts a finer point on the folksonomy buzz, which is already getting too loud for my ears. Dan makes the point of clarifying that the process of freetagging is not the same as creating folksonomies. The notion of a freetag, or a user-supplied index term as I know it to be historically called in IR, is not the same as builiding what Thomas Vanderwal calls a folksonomy. Folksonomies are like (analagous to) thesauri or taxonomies (without the important aspect of control, of course).

But folksonomies, unlike taxonomies, aren't built, they emerge organically through the accretion of freetags. It's probably a good point to make the analogy that freetag is like index term and folksonomy is like taxonomy (or controlled vocabulary) in order to help people understand what these terms mean. There's no doubt that there are information workers outside of the world of del.icio.us and flickr have no idea what these terms mean and why they should matter. They will need to pay attention sooner or later.

The distinctions Dan and Thomas are making are probably minor to most people who use freetagging sites. I think Dan and Thomas are navel gazing at the minutiae because terms are being coined left and right in industry mags, on discussion boards and in blogs and knowledgable IAs and content people are trying to hone the terms so the meaning matches the use of the vocabulary. This is sort of important at this stage, because soon applications will be released that throw the terms around and as the applications start getting recognition, the meaning of terms will become modified with the use. This is sort of what happened with the term "taxonomy", which a lot of information workers hated because it wasn't quite correct. A few key business people start using a term one way and boom, it's accepted jargon.

This idea of freetagging isn't new by the way, but the bubbling up of tags into large shared lists in heavily used sites is. If only del.icio.us or flickr would think about applying synonym rings to make clustering more usable then we'd have something special. Even I'd be willing to work on that in order to use it, especially on image databases.

Figuring out how to make images findable was the main reason I studied library and information science. I even proposed freetags (user-supplied keywords I called them) in a hypothetical visual resources database I wrote a spec for in 1997. After grad school I turned down job offers related to image indexing at StockObjects and TMS and interviews at Corbis because I wanted be a web designer instead. I didn't like the idea of going into those places to actually work as an indexer massaging the thesauri. I don't even do that where I work now because we have someone who dedicates about 75% of his time doing just that. I couldn't do that.

Anyway, all interesting stuff. I just hope the recent rash of arbitrary technology acronyms and neologisms end soon.