Tagging and folksonomy are two words that have been flying around the net thanks to social networking sites such as del.icio.us and Flickr. If you've ever wondered what the tags at the bottom of my posts mean well they are Technorati tags. Tags are a means to order the web and they are applied by the user. For example, when I published my photos from a trip to New York I tagged them NewYork so that others could view them if they looked for photos of NewYork. Because the user tags things themselves rather than placing them in pre-existing categories it is called Folksonomy.

The great thing about tagging is that it is spreading throughout the web and thanks to various programmes you can do some pretty cool things with tags.

Spell with flickr is a word generator that uses tagged photos from the Flickr archive. Fabulous! Simply type in a word and see what happens.

You can do something similar over at amaztype - an Amazon visualiser. Type in a word and the result will be cover art from Amazon. You can click on the books and they show up in amazon.

See also Clive Thompson's post in collision detection on Krazydad's Color Fields Colr Pickr enabling anyone "to point to a particular color on a color-wheel, and the app displays a set of Flickr photos that are all precisely that hue". via Smartmobs
Tags: Technology