Taxonomy, Folksonomy, and Web 2.0

In the past few years, there has been many drastic changes in the way that people use the internet and these changes have brought about a new way of searching for information and content on the internet. In the world of Web1.0, search engines seem to be programs that use a Taxonomy system in order to provide search results. They list results in order of which site have the most content relating to the search word and the hierarchy seems to have been pre determined and stays on track. Searches are broken into levels and the results or strict to the search word, making the search seem very Mechanical and scientific.
With the development of Web2.0 and the bloom of social networking sites, users are now able to share blogs, photos, music, and videos with each other, with very little effort. In order to shift through all the media that is available on these sites, such as youtube.com, myspace.com, and photobucket.com, users choose “tags” that relate to the material that they have uploaded. These “tags” are a method of Folksonomy, a collaborative categorization system, which tends to leave a sense of freedom in the searches. Different users may have different interpretations of a word for a “tag” which tends to make searches come up with much broader and often more interesting results. The Folksonomy and “tag” system can take users on a journey through the interpretations of other users and can sometimes end up introducing a searching user to something completely new that might interest them.