The “folk” part of folksonomy is about ordinary web citizens creating knowledge. It’s
about harnessing the power and knowledge of the many, making it possible for grandmas
in the Netherlands and precocious seventh graders to collaborate on expanding the
world’s knowledge.
Folksonomy pertains specifically to ordinary citizens categorizing the web through
tagging—the ‘onomy’ part of the word pertaining to taxonomy. Other ‘folksy’ projects
include efforts like wikipedia which is the creation of web pages in a collaborative
manner.
In this paper, we discuss a new type of collaborative knowledge creation—folkclustering.
Folkclustering is the many creating lists of web resources. Whereas Vivisimo and others
cluster search results for users, using algorithmic methods, folkclustering is about
ordinary users clustering resources together for other users.
Perhaps the most popular example is Amazon’s Listmania.