What is Folksonomy?

Folksonomy is a combination of the words folks and taxonomy meaning “people classification management.” This allows users some level of control over how the web is organized using “tags”. Tagging is the process of labeling a piece data with metadata.

Using Folksonomy as Subtle Marketing

One of the major players currently using folksonomy is Del.icio.us.

Del.icio.us is a social bookmarking web application that is growing very fast in popularity. With a free account, del.icio.us users can submit and access all of their bookmarks from any computer with Internet access. By submitting and tagging your own web pages, you instantly give access to thousands of other users with interests in the same tags. Encouraging site visitors to submit your selected webpages to their own del.icio.us bookmark page is a very good way to get more exposure to del.icio.us users. Submitting to del.icio.us is instant and it creates meaningful relevant links important to the major search engines.

I expect Del.icio.us and other social bookmarking sites to reshape how the web is categorized. And the coolest thing- right now its free. Check it out.