/folksonomy/

Folksonomy, or free keyword tags, engages in a demography extended in numbers and diversity for the communities to cultivate common interests and related resources upon concentrations as marked by words. It is a pooling of many perspectives on some common resource that, through clustering phenomena, reveals the general inclination.

note - The averaging that occurs boils down to singularities as represented by the tag networks. There is a similarity between this active process that includes large participating groups and the research discovery activities that rely on taking large samples as the dataset to analyze and establish trends and arguments supporting a stated hypothesis.

[rel:
getluky.net : open source free-tag module for php/mysql apps ;
]

[uncurated links (wikipedia):
Gene Smith on folksonomy
Clay Shirky on folksonomy
Vanderwal on folksonomy
Alex Wright on folksonomy
Mob indexing? Folk categorization? Social tagging?
Jordan Willms on Gardened hierarchical folksonomy
Folksonomies - Cooperative Classification and Communication Through Shared Metadata by Adam Mathes Widely praised paper on folksonomy
Peter Van Dijck on Emergent i18n effects in folksonomies
Salon.com's popular introduction to Folksonomy
Bruce Sterling article on folksonomy from Wired
'Folksonomies: Power to the People'
Flickr and "folksonomies"
Folksonomizer: generic folksonomy service
Anthropology News article on folksonomy.
Panel from ETech 2005 - With Joshua Schachter (del.icio.us),
Stewart Butterfield (Flickr), Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia) and Clay Shirky.
UGWiki entry for Folksonomy
]