Folksonomies

Word cloud of Folksonomies webpage (Source: Created by Mark Pegrum with EdWordle, www.edwordle.net)

Folksonomies, whose social nature is reflected in the inclusion of the word ‘folk’ in their name, are a classic web 2.0 tool. The process of creating a folksonomy, also known as social bookmarking, involves tagging resources to build an index which may be shared, often in the form of a tag cloud (see below). While the first popular folksonomy service amongst educators was Delicious, changes to the platform led many educators to switch to the alternative service, Diigo, and it was announced in mid-2017 that Delicious would cease operation. With Diigo (and, formerly, Delicious) available as a mobile app, there is potentially a connection with mobile learning.

As user-generated indexes of online materials, folksonomies depend on the principle of collective intelligence, since they are a way of connecting distributed knowledge. They are a great way to keep track of online data trails and useful resources that have been discovered. Although folksonomies can be individually generated, it is also possible for groups of people – whether educators, researchers or students – to collaboratively create folksonomies of resources on particular topics, with criteria for inclusion being negotiated by group members. It can be seen that folksonomies represent a significant shift away from traditional top-down taxonomies – that is, hierarchical indexing systems – for several reasons:

• • the tagging process is organic rather than methodical or mechanical: you simply add a tag or tags to relevant materials as you come across them
  • there are no pre-set categories or subcategories: you can use whatever descriptive tags seem relevant and add new ones as often as you like, meaning that the index is flexible and extensible
  • tags are able to be changed, and multiple similar tags (e.g., ‘blog’, ‘blogs’, ‘blogging’) can be collapsed into a single category (e.g., ‘blogs’) at a later date
  • the resulting index may be (but does not have to be) presented in the non-linear form of a tag cloud (see below)

It is very easy to set up a folksonomy. After creating a free account with a service such as Diigo, users are prompted to download a tagging button to their browser bar. Using this button, they can add items to their index by tagging them, that is, adding a descriptive term or terms. One common display format of a folksonomy index is the tag cloud, which can be automatically generated. The more often a particular tag has been used, the larger and heavier the font of that tag within the tag cloud. Below you can see an extract from Mark Pegrum’s E-language Tag Cloud, displaying the tags beginning with numbers or the letter ‘A’. Clicking on any tag will take you to a list of all the materials which have been tagged with that particular term. The full interactive tag cloud, covering the whole alphabet, can be found on the E-language tag cloud page of this website.

There is a blurry line between folksonomies and social sharing, and there are varied services that have some similarity to both in that they involve tagging as well as sharing of online materials. In addition to being a folksonomy service, Diigo functions as a social annotation tool for highlighting and leaving comments on webpages. Tizmos lets you share lists of materials displayed as visual bookmarks; Pinterest allows materials to be collected and displayed on visual pin-up boards; and Wakelet allows you to create private or sharable visual collections of links. LibraryThing is a service for tagging books and sharing reviews; Zotero is for managing and sharing links to online research; and BibSonomy is for managing links to scientific publications. Evernote and Instapaper allow you to capture a range of multimedia materials. It is also worth checking out social news sites like Digg and Reddit.

Word clouds are a popular variation on tag clouds. They display the key words in a text using the tag cloud metaphor (with more commonly used words shown in larger fonts, but without being clickable or linked to an index). The best-known example of such a service is probably EdWordle; at the top of this page you can see a word cloud created with EdWordle to display the most commonly occurring words on the current Folksonomies webpage (as of 2024). Similar services include TagCrowd, Word Cloud Generator and WordItOut. Other services such as Tagxedo, WordArt and WordClouds allow you to create similar word cloud displays, but with the overall texts shaped into the form of images. A number of polling services offer word cloud display options to show audience responses, with well-known examples including AnswerGarden and Mentimeter.

Last update: July 2024.