Welcome to my series of blog posts on the ABC's of Social Media, a tool that you can use to make you more "hip" in the world of Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn (just to name a few).  Today's letter is "F".  F gives us works like Feeds, Forums, Friends, and Flogs, but I'm going with another odd one that you most likely haven't heard before - folksonomy.

"F" is for Folksonomy

Folksonomy

Pronounced: Fohks-son-uh-mee

Folksonomy (also known as collaborative tagging, social classification, social indexing, and social tagging) is the practice and method of collaboratively creating and managing tags to annotate and categorize content.  Folksonomy has become a popular term to describe the bottom-up classification systems that emerge from social tagging.

Folksonomies became popular on the Web around 2004 with social software applications such as social bookmarking or annotating photographs. Websites that support tagging, such as Facebook and MySpace, and the principle of folksonomy are referred to in the context of Web 2.0 because participation is very easy and tagging data is used in new ways to find information. For example, tag clouds are frequently used to visualize the most used tags of a folksonomy. The term folksonomy is also used to denote only the set of tags that are created in social tagging.