Thing #20: Find a Folksonomy and Describe It in Your Blog

Folksonomy: apparently it is also known as "collaborative tagging, social classification, social indexing, and social tagging",according to Wikipedia.
My understanding is that a Folksonomy is the group of words that catagorize information with tags (words) to any pictures, books, blogs etc. with common everyday words that users can understand. The tags (words) are to help to find the item more easily when searching for it again, and also finding other related items that have the same tag name. It is supposed to make it easier to search and navigate for things over time.
Apparently anyone can add a tag to a picture, book, blog etc. so that there may be many tags associated with it. Everyone who views the item could possibly tag it with a different word, so there is no control over what people choose so it is also considered to be somewhat unreliable and can make inconsistent results.

I like to do jigsaw puzzles on my Facebook with the "Puzzle Bee" application and I often do searches for a puzzle to do. The photos that are submitted on the site are tagged by them and also by other users, and that is how the search is performed. For example I've searched for beaches, love, winter, etc. Then I search through all the photos with that tag for the one I'd like to do as a puzzle.
I notice that this application has quite a list of rules for tagging and they moderate the tags. Only experienced users are allowed to add tags to other users photos.
They also suggest: Puzzle Bee is NOT a comprehensive image gallery. ONLY add tags if you would want that puzzle to be found when YOU search for that tag.
Use simple tags that tell what the puzzle is about - not what also is a part of it or what it may represent.
If a puzzle already has a many tags (more than 5), please resist the temptation to add even more tags.

So I guess this is one application where they are trying to keep some kind of control over what users tag... maybe to prevent over tagging. Interesting, I've been using this application for some time and never knew it was a form of a Folksonomy... cool!