Folksonomies: Year One

So it was a year ago today that I first posted about folksonomies, that hideous jargon term that you either love or hate. For whatever reason--I certainly don't take any credit--it was around that time that interest in tagging started to explode.

When Thomas first mentioned the term on the IA Institute's mailing list, Google returned no results for it. Today there are 508,000 (though that number fluctuates quite a bit).

I've always enjoyed understanding how ideas spread, and why some catch fire and others fizzle. So early on, when I saw the term gaining momentum, I kept track of who was posting about it and how many search results it returned. Here's a graph I made of the first seven weeks in the life of folksonomy:

The numbers represent:

1. My first post
2. Thomas posts about folksonomy, as does Stewart (now gone it seems).
3. Jon Udell covers a number of similar ideas in his Collaborative Knowledge Gardening article
4. Clay Shirky writes about folksonomy on Many 2 Many
5. Peter Merholz posts on ethnoclassification and vernacular vocabularies. I can't say for sure if Peter's responsible for the subsequent pop in the use of folksonomy, but he's widely read and his post is the only data point I can find around this time. The irony, of course, is that Peter panned the term in favour ethnoclassification (and proved that old saying bad publicity in the process).
6. The numbers dip here as Google deals with aggregator pollution (I think)

Though I can't take credit for tagging or folksonomy (the word or the concept), I think I made one important contribution by addressing tagging's shortcomings (like lack of precision and synonym control) as well as its benefits right out of the gate. Some of the ideas in Ontology is Overrated trace back to Clay's response to my original post. And in the past year we've had more people talking about classification than ever before, debating the merits of tagging vs. hierarchies, and doing so with an often unexpected zeal. (When it comes to tagging I've swung from enthusiasm to scepticism to something approximating sceptithusiasm.)

Whatever your thoughts are about information architects and "traditional" classification systems, the debate itself proves the importance of information architecture. Ad hoc classification systems, like tagging, emerge because they must; information not only wants to be free, it wants to be findable and it wants its relationship to other information expressed. And the fact that people care enough about this small-i, small-a kind of information architecture enough to blog and argue about it (and build applications) is a good thing for those of us who care about big IA.