A while ago on the aifia-members list, Gene Smith asked about social classification generated by the informal user tagging in Flickr, del.icio.us, etc. In his reply on the list, Thomas coined the term folksonomy to describe these informal classifications, and Gene’s folksonomy blog post sparked a lot of conversation around the community.

One thing that really strikes me about social classification is that it’s user-centered bottom up classification. Most bottom up classification is document or collection centric. Social classification provides insight not just into content, but into users and context as well.