...Users assign name, tag, to any image, article, blog, bookmark, or URL. Later, when they want to recall this content, they can search for its tag and find exactly what they're looking for. Applications, sites, and new uses for tags have been spreading like wildfire, so much so that major Internet commerce companies are starting to invest serious attention (and funds) in making these home-grown taxonomies part of their systems.

If folksonomy sounds like anarchy on the World Wide Web, with people bending rules to their individual needs and tastes, it isn't. In fact, tagging is at the core of some of the most vibrant and cohesive online communities.

Not everyone is ready to leave behind the structured comfort of a controlled taxonomy and jump on the self-tagging bandwagon just yet, however. For the same reason librarians still rely heavily on the Dewey decimal system, information architects argue that the Internet will always need a clear taxonomical structure to make digital surfing manageable.

Many cybersearchers are pushing against the limitations of a traditional taxonomy. Whether they succeed in overthrowing the controlled vocabulary hierarchy and setting up a free-for-all folksonomy in its place remains to be seen, but experts agree--now that "every man" has power over the language of classification, searching will never be the same.

SEARCH VOCABULARY IN THE VERNACULAR

A vast amount of digital data goes online every day. When people tag that data, they aren't just creating more data--they're creating metadata, which is used by search engines to interpret the content to which it's attached. Major search engines create metadata based on predefined categories for every page that they index, which their individual searchbots can read. The problem is that content is being created faster than bots can crawl, extract keywords, and fit them into the engine's hierarchy. Not to mention the fact that a lot of content is made up of pictures, blog entries, personal Web sites, and other personal data that can't be easily crawled by searchbots, which only understand text.

The major search engines cover a lot of ground, but simple searches yield far too many results to recall something specific. Using tags, the content that most users tagged, say, with the term bears will rise to the top of the list, so searchers can at least be sure that some human was thinking bears when they tagged that content. According to del.icio.us VP of business development Chris Fralic, tags are based on the user's personal search experience, "the first few words that come to mind when you're in a...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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