What's the best way to tag, bag, and sort data? Give it to the unorganized masses

We used to rely on philosophers to put the world in order. Now we've got information architects. But they're not doing the work - we are.

There's a revolution going on in the art and science of categorization, and its name is folksonomy, a term term invented by information architect Thomas Vander Wal. Folksonomy is like taxonomy, the traditional way to impose structure on the blooming confusion of raw reality. For instance, the human being known as Thomas Vander Wal might be taxonomized as kingdom Animalia, phylum Chordata, subphylum Vertebrata, class Mammalia, subclass Eutheria, order Primata, suborder Haplorhini, family Hominidae, genus Homo, species sapiens. That's accurate, and experts agree it's true. Unfortunately, to make full use of this scheme, you need to be trained in com�parative anatomy, as well as Latin.

A folksonomy, on the other hand, arises spontaneously as Net users encounter information, think about what it means, and tag it with descriptive words. Then software makes the information accessible via a simple keyword search. The results aren't definitive or scientific, but they can be very useful.