In Adrian Miles excerpt I have chosen to explore the following notion:

‘ What underlies such change, however, are the principles of distributed content production and sharing, folksonomies, trust networks and having access to skills that let you collate and build’.

I wish specifically to explore the way that Folksonomies have changed the way that we conduct ourselves, and how learning to master them is helpful in my future career. Folksonomies, otherwise broadly known as tagging, is a feature in Web 2.0 that has really changed the way that we conduct ourselves online, both socially and economically. “Tagging is a promising informal and simple mechanism to collaboratively add (mostly incomplete) order to a wealth of data, objects and resources” (Derntl et al. 2011). I have specifically set out my essay in separate blog posts to demonstrate to you how tagging works and how useful it can be. Each separate blog posts has a number of tags that connect themselves to other posts that have similar information; for instance there might be a blog post about the history of folksonomy, with a tag of “history of folksonomy” if you were to click on that tag then all other blog posts with a similar topic will collate themselves together. There is also a main tag that connects all these blog posts so that you may read the essay in its entirety before shifting it around with other tags, something I suggest the reader should do.

Folksonomy is a phrase coined by Thomas Vander Wal who is currently a Senior User Experience Designer and Strategist at Design for Context in Bethesda USA (Vander Wal 2014). He runs a blog of his own that ‘notes changes to in the web design development world”. Vander Wal Describes folksonomies as:

“the result of personal free tagging of information and objects (anything with a URL) for ones own retrieval. The tagging is done in a social environment (usually shared and open to others). Folksonomy is created from the act of tagging by the person consuming the information.” (Vander Wal 2014)