Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge
From wikipedia: Folksonomy is a neologism for a practice of collaborative categorization using freely chosen keywords. More colloquially, this refers to a group of people cooperating spontaneously to organize information into categories, noted because it is almost completely unlike traditional formal methods of faceted classification. This phenomenon typically only arises in non-heirarchical communities, such as public websites, as opposed to multi-level teams. Since the oragnizers of the information are usually its primary users, folksonomy produces results that reflect more accurately the population’s conceptual model of the information.
Folksonomies and tagging have been buzzing around the www for a while, and can be seen in use at sites such as Flickr and del.icio.us. Taking a cue from this emerging taxonomic method, I thought I might borrow the animal classifications elaborated in “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins” by Borges and apply them to web pages, using del.icio.us (http://del.icio.us/cyborges) as the means to start categorizing the www. If you have a del.icio.us account, please feel free to contribute by tagging web pages with one of the following categories:
a) those that belong to the emperor
b) embalmed ones
c) those that are trained
d) suckling pigs
e) mermaids
f) fabulous ones
g) stray dogs
h) those that are included in this classification
i) those that tremble as if they were mad
j) innumerable ones
k) those drawn with a very fine camel hair brush
l) others
m) those that have just broken a flower vase
n) those that resemble flies from a distance
Due to the nature of tagging on del.icio.us, please denote spaces with a period, such that the category “those that have just broken a flower vase” becomes “those.that.have.just.broken.a.flower.vase”. A bit of a pain in the arse, but not so much for anyone who has ever had a broken space bar.