Tagging is folksonomy but folksonomy is not tagging !
No I’m not looking to squeeze the maximum number of buzzwords into a title, but to make my point that folksonomy means more than simply tagging. Today it’s undoubtedly true that folksonomy is systematically associated with tagging.
There are numerous definitions of folksonomy on the Internet (see the references at the end of this article). If I were to summarize all the definitions in one sentence, folksonomy (a contraction of folk and taxonomy) is a method of categorizing information in a collaborative and decentralized way. Those who participate will categorize information according to their own point of view and agree to share their classification with the other users. The idea is to profit from the collective effort in order to search better and faster and to discover things related to one’s interests. You could say that folksonomy industrialises the word-of-mouth principle that we use every day. Folksonomy doesn’t include notions of classification or vocabulary control. A directory like DMoz Open Directory cannot be considered as belonging to folksonomy even though it’s built collectively, since it forces users and editors to stick to a single classification.