Folksonomies Tap People Power 

Conversely, Vander Wal explained, Flickr's system is a narrow folksonomy, because rather than many people tagging the same communal items, as with Delicious, small numbers of users tag individual items. Thus many users tag items, but of those, only a small number will tag a particular item.

"You don't have quite that capability of the power curve," said Vander Wal, "but you do have that ability of adding metadata to an object."

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Haughey said MetaFilter's tagging system has been useful because by allowing people to tag their posts, including the tens of thousands of entries the site has accumulated since its birth in 1999, it brought some order to the site.

"I wanted the authors of a post to help organize them, so the archives could be more useful," he said.

Technorati's folksonomy is organized by categories defined by bloggers, who add tags to their blog posts. The result is that clicking on tags, such as "Current Affairs," brings users to the latest blog posts aggregated by Technorati with that tag.

Technorati's tag results also display results for the same tags on Delicious and Flickr.

Vander Wal said that because Technorati's system works by having blog posts with embedded tags that point to Technorati, which in turn point back to the posts, it "becomes a huge magnet for spam."

But Cory Doctorow, an editor of popular blog Boing Boing, disagrees.

"Technorati tags blend three different internet services and three services' worth of tags to tease meaning out of the ether," Doctorow wrote. "Brilliant."

To Steve Rubel, author of the blog Micro Persuasion, folksonomies are a boon for marketers, who, he said, can get real-time views of what user sites like Flickr or Delicious are interested in.

"Where the eyeballs go," Rubel said, "there's an opportunity to experiment with marketing."

Rubel also said he'd like to see services like Google add tags as a way to bring more user-specific context to search results. As it is, he explained, search-engine results differ from tag searches in that they are not based on user-created content.

"One of the things that's nice to see is that people are actually spending time tagging and doing it in a social environment, and following the power curve and the net effect," said Vander Wal. "The more people getting involved with it, the greater the value."

More stories written by Daniel Terdiman