[PGCanada] folksonomy?

Jen Zed jenzed at gmail.com
Wed Mar 30 10:17:16 PST 2005


No need to regret the question. :)

I'm playing around with the idea of building the PG Canada site as
both a document portal and a community portal. My idea is that it
would be cool to allow users to have (*optional*) PG-CA "personas",
with personal bookmarks, areas for discussing books, saved interface
customization, saved searches, etc.

On feature of a community site could be support for a "folksonomy",
which is an informal, non-heirarchical, per-user set of classification
keywords associated with books. These informal tags can be seen by all
users, thus allowing semi-serendipitous browsing of the PG-CA stacks.
Folksonomy classification would be in addition to any formal
classification we do as part of the publication process.  Folksonomy
tags would be stored at the user level, not as part of the
meta-information about the book.

As an example, UserFoo might add the folksonomy tags "bugs"
"black_flies" and "creepy_crawlies" to a book called "A Survey of Pond
Life in Upper Canada". UserBar might add the tags "tadpoles"
"mosquitoes". UserBas could search the folksonomy tags "black_flies"
and "tadpoles" and get a list of books contain both of these
folksonomy keywords.

There's a (better) definition of Folksonomy (with some excellent
links) on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folksonomy). Sites
that use folksonomies include http://del.icio.us/,
http://www.flickr.com/ and http://gimp-savvy.com/PHOTO-ARCHIVE/.


jen.


On Wed, 30 Mar 2005 09:43:11 -0800 (PST), Andrew Sly <sly at victoria.tc.ca> wrote:
> 
> 
> Jen, I know I'll regret asking this...
> 
> but what is a "folksonomy"
> 
> (As mentioned in the wiki)
> 
> Andrew
> _______________________________________________
> Project Gutenberg of Canada
> Website: http://www.projectgutenberg.ca/
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