Folksonomies….
Flickr is a great example of an online community that allows its user’s social tagging functions. Flickr uses tags as a core concept in the retrieval and organization of contributed photos. Flickr allows images to be organized by tags, and subsequently easily found in a search. The combination of tagging, social networking, and online photo sharing has allowed Flickr to become extremely popular in a short amount of time. Tagging patterns of members can vary drastically, but regardless of how well or how often you tag, Flickr certainly encourages its members to tag images, and uses its tags to categorize photos.
A folksonomy emerges out of this community tagging each others images. A folksonomy is the result of one item being categorized, or tagged by many people. Folksonomies give a user driven approach to organize content. This is a major power shift in the way content is organized in the past. Now the members, the audience has the power and ability to organize content, something that was once done only by the creators of the site.
This is the part of the phenomena which is associated with Flickr. It promotes the concept that its users have the control over the way their web site is organized. The users tag their images, which give organization and a classification system to its product. This shifts the control of the website from the web programmers to the users… A concept that we must embrace, at the rate this site and similar others are rapidly increasing, we must accept and indulge in Flickr, and like communities… We have no choice.