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Folksonomies: a user-driven approach to organising content

Joshua Porter has written an overview of folksonomies. To quote:

Although taxonomies are common, it can be difficult for design teams to implement them. For one thing, taxonomies are very expensive to create and maintain, often involving month-long projects by several members of the team. For sites with thousands (or even millions) of pages, this Herculean task is sometimes never complete. As a result, broken taxonomies can remain until the design team attempts a complete redesign. Second, taxonomies may fail to reflect the language of users if they are not fully tested with the target population. This results in a less effective site that leads to user failure, user frustration, or increased support costs.

Posted by jamesr on July 22, 2006 03:40 PM
Categories: Information architecture