Right, they are both equally useless except one uses real english words and one doesn't. But the one that uses real english words is far preferable because it doesn't cause people's stomach's to tie up in knots. Once you explain the term to them once, they much more likely to go "Oh, I get it." With folksonomy, they are more likely to go "What is that again?" On 10/3/05, Larry Garfield <larry@garfieldtech.com> wrote:

For what it's worth, as of this post I have no forking idea what "folksonomy" means OR what "free tagging" means. Really, neither name tells me what it actually does to the level that I'd be interested in.

My initial gut reactions to both names:

"folksonomy": Um, OK, geeky stupid name for something that has to do with people ("folks"). Um, the study of people, maybe? Whoever came up with this name must think that recursive acronyms are cool. What a nerd.

"free tagging": OK, it involves tagging something freely. What's tagging? HTML tag? Tag like a label, like on clothing? Tag like a flag on something? I assume they don't mean free beer, and Drupal's already free speech, so they must mean "disorganized". OK, so why the fork would I want to have disorganized labels???

So I don't really like either one. :-) Free tagging feels more descriptive while folksonomy is far too "kitch" for me to take seriously, so that's better, but I still don't know what we're talking about. :-)

Hopefully that will offer some useful insight.

On Monday 03 October 2005 04:39 pm, Charlie Lowe wrote:

...

Bèr wrote:

"So, the original question was: should 'free tagging' rather be called 'folksonomy' because more people will be attracted to that term, or should we choose the more appropriate, yet less known term 'free tagging'."

Or do you choose the term that is most usable? This is different than whether a term is more appropriate or more widely used (widely depends on audience, who is using it). So let's complicate things:

"Folksonomy" may indeed be more popular in terms of Google hits because of social software types talking about it on the web. Consider that the majority of people that talk about folksonomy on the web may know what "free tagging" means, too.

Also, given that someone may not know what either term means, "free tagging" is more likely to suggest what the use of the module is or at least will more quickly make sense. I also suspect that "free tagging" will catch on as a term because it's not as jargon or technical sounding as "folksonomy." "Free tagging" describes the action of doing something. "Folksonomy" is an abstract concept.

Charlie

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