Taxonomy and Folksonomy

Hi Readers,
In this week's post I'm going to try to explain taxonomy, the old fashioned way of categorising information and folksonomy, the new school way of categorising information. Folksonomy seems to be so new school my spell checker doesn't even recognise it as a word! So the difference between the two forms of categorisation is that taxonomy is do by putting things in metaphorical boxes. Say for example putting 'riding a bike' in a box labelled 'exercising'. Now the problem with this is that 'riding a bike' could also go in a box labelled 'transport'. This is where folksonomy makes itself very useful because folksonomy isn't about putting things in boxes, instead it 'tags' things so they will come up under as many categories as the thing has tags. So 'riding a bike' could be tagged with both 'exercising' and 'transport'. This is very useful on the internet, for example on flickr users can tag their photos with many tags like 'friends' 'football grand final' 'party' etc... and someone could search any of these tags and find this image instead of only being able to find it in one place. Another example is Blogger.
I will leave you now to think about the irony of my tagging taxonomy,
The Jumper of Candle Sticks