Home-made categories

Something that got stuck in my head after the lecture in week 5 was the concept of folksonomy. How we have, in difference to taxonomy, have found a system to this very loose and undefined way of categorising things. I really like the idea of tags and how they are informal and personal. It means that we can take a part in other peoples associations and metaphors which in the end will open us up to new ways of thinking.
So what exactly is folksonomy? Well, it is a social way of giving things a belonging with the help of tags. This is a informal and loose way of putting things in to a category. an example of a folksonomy is how flickr uses tags to structure their collection of photos. The different tags and the combination of tags give the photo a category, although it could be categories like "bullshit" or "crap". This photo from flickr is taged with the words: audio, music, sound, listen, stereo, hifi, mono, speaker, pump, disco, tape, tapeplayer, player, cassette, unraveled, mess, broken, spewing, spitting, pattern, chaos, magnetic, retro, symmetric, mirrored, reflection, tangled, unwound, fastfoward, rewind and eject. Now all of these tags is related to this image, but in all kinds of different ways. they are personal, individual, metaphoric or literal. this means for example if I'm looking for something that will represent mess I can find this photo, and it might represent mess in a different way then I was thinking but it is still a mess.
another example of a good use of tags is tag clouds. This is a collection of tags which have a size factor attached to them as well. For example the tag cloud on We Heart It (click on the image to get a bigger picture).
The encourage everyone to tag their hearted items so that people easily can find what their looking for, or at least a range of suggestions. I think this is a great way of presenting a web site with this kind of information. it is easy, it is inspiring, it is effective and it gives you an idea on what the most popular images have been tagged with.