Article: Folksonomies: A User-Driven Approach to Organizing Content

UIEtips 7/19/06: Folksonomies: A User-Driven Approach to Organizing Content

Design teams frequently need to organize thousands and sometimes millions of pages of content. With so much content, how can these teams go about creating an information architecture that is workable, extensible, and meaningful for the site’s users?

One strategy is tagging. Just ask users to free associate words and phrases with every piece of content you have. Soon you have a site organization that’s completely user-driven, making it easy to find everything in a heartbeat. Tagging lets users decide the categorization of the content on the site. Sounds straightforward, but does it work?

Sites like Del.icio.us and Flickr have pioneered the use of tags, demonstrating their usefulness in several different settings. Even established players, like Amazon and Google, are using them. This style of community tagging, commonly referred to as a Folksonomy, allows a site to create an alternative categorization scheme, created by the users of that site. But, can they be useful in your design?

In this week’s UIEtips, we’ve re-published an article where Josh Porter discusses tagging and folksonomies. We believe folksonomies, while not yet a proven design tool, show great promise in helping design teams manage large amounts of content.

If you find this article interesting, you’ll also want to check out our latest UIE Virtual Seminar on July 27th, Is Tagging Right for Your Site?, Josh will show examples from dozens of web sites and talk about uses of tags in all industries.