Folksonomy. If you’ve never heard of it, you probably will soon. You may have even engaged in it already.

Folksonomy is an informal social classification system which is catching on in various places around the web. You can see it in action at Flickr, Furl, and del.icio.us. It involves people ‘tagging’ entries with categorical names and then being able to see other people’s entries with the same ‘tag.’ The entries could be URL bookmarks or pictures or resolutions. The gist of it is that a group of people creates its own system for classification.

Eh, so what, you say. I did too at first. Then someone pointed me to the concept of using folksonomies in conjunction with RSS feeds. RSS is also catching on as an efficient way to keep up with blogs and other informational sites you read. Instead of visitng all the sites separately, you get a pared down list of all the recent entries on one page. You can skim for what’s interesting and click through when you find it. If you read a lot of blogs and aren’t using RSS, do consider it. I am using the Sage RSS reader which appears as a sidebar in my Firefox window. It’s very nice.

Back to tagging, many of these folksonomy sites have RSS feeds. This is the critical piece of information which makes this all so interesting. Having that synergy allows one to follow conversations of interest all over the web automatically. For example, in my RSS aggregator, I get the feed from del.icio.us for the tag ‘CSS’. Whenever someone tags an interesting site under the category ‘CSS’, it appears in my feed. This means that I can see what other people are doing, what they find interesting and useful enough to catalog for later.

I also get feeds from Flickr for the tags abstract, michigan, losangeles, iraq, ocean. I get to see a thumbnail of pictures being uploaded in these categories and can click through to the ones I find interesting. I also get a few feeds from particular photographers, like pinhole.

I realize this is all fairly geek-oriented and will take a long time to trickle down to the masses, if it ever does. But if you are interested in keeping tabs on the flow of information around the web, especially the leading edge of any given wave, this is an excellent system for making sense of it all.