Yesterday I was reading Jeff Hester’s post on folksonomy tagging and its popularity on social sites by techie and not-so-techie users.

Fo those catching up to the Web 2.0 phenomenon, Wikipedia describes folksonomy tagging:

A “folksonomy” is a collaboratively generated, open-ended labeling system that enables Internet users to categorize content such as Web pages, online photographs, and Web links. The freely chosen labels – called tags – help to improve search engine’s effectiveness because content is categorized using a familiar, accessible, and shared vocabulary.

Tagging is user initiated and widely used on social sites like Flickr, del.icio.us, Technorati and YouTube.

While I find the social evolution of the web fascinating and am thrilled to see the power of content distribution moving to the masses (“Who controls the information?!”), what I found even more interesting was the comparison of folksonomy and ontology by NYU’s Clay Shirky in the summary of his O’Reilly Emerging Technology presentation.

Ontology would refer to the classic, top-down classification system such as the Dewey Decimal system for library classification. I.e. an authoritative body determines which words are allowable for use.

While one of the primary advantages of this system is consistency, an established list can quickly become inflexible, slow to change, and difficult to keep current (certain death for our rapidly evolving web-based existence). In contrast, folksonomy literally means, “people’s classification management”.

The same day I read about these criticisms on Ontologically based systems, I spoke with a friend who got a job with a private social services organization. They require a full background check, finger prints, drug test–the whole shebang. Since she is coming from another job for which she had to go through the same rigamaroll, her new employer kindly offered to ask the county to transfer her info.

Days go by, a week goes by, they can’t find her info. Turns out, her file had been classified as a “schools” file and her new employer is classified “social services.” This one distinction caused her to have to go back to the county, spend another $50 to get fingerprinted. Shows the importance of how information is organized!