What determines the structure of a folksonomy and why? The code, the content or the social process?

What determines the structure of a folksonomy and why? The code, the content or the social process?

Firstly, to being with, with a basic Wikipedia explanation of what folksonomy is that it is basically a system of classification derived from the practice and method of collaboratively creating and managing tags to annotate and categorize content; this practice is also known as collaborative tagging, social classification, social indexing, and social tagging. All in all, folksonomy is an easier way of accessing information, even through a mere keyword. A folksonomy brings life to a network, without network folksonomy wouldn’t exists and vice versa. It is the mere acknowledgement of social processes through popularization. Folksonomy represents information/ knowledge provided by the tagger e.g. in terms of a picture, the content provided is the form of folksonomy. Thus, content and social processing are the basic structure determinant of folksonomy serving its purpose and not the code .

I believe, social processing is a factor that occurs because of folksonomy. Facebook, Twitter, IGoogle and perhaps in some cases even yahoo chats are networks where social processing takes place. Facebook for example is a very popular network that displays pictures, information, interests and many more user approved information. Pictures for example, when tagged if provided by the user display who, what, when, where, why and even how in some cases. This display of information through tags (folksonomy) when viewed by other users is the means of popularizing that specific content. Thus, this increases social processes because of folksonomy and folksonomy because of social processes. Overall, justifying that social process and content are the actual determinants of folksonomy.

A useful way of understanding folksonomy : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8Q7_ifGpFg&feature=related

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