When you start to have more than a couple dozen folks that you follow on Twitter, the prospect of managing the relationships you're creating starts to get a little overwhelming. We've all met great people on social media sites. And there is usually some singular trait that drew you to interact with these great people. However, as you get to know them, watch their Twitter stream and see who else they interact with, you probably get to know more interesting things about them. So what may have started out as a business relationship interest, over time, the total picture of that person starts to become clearer.
You may notice an industry pro talking about his grandmother who just used to live next to Abraham Zapruder.Maybe you find out someone went to pastry school while they "searched for identity" before becoming a CPA.You might discover that someone who has been so hard to get a response from on Twitter actually shares your love for collecting frog figurines.This is the joy of building your social network -- you find out all of these great nuggets that help shape a picture of each person in your network. You begin develop perceptions of personalities based on interesting traits about your new relationships. Hopefully, you're sharing bits and pieces with your followers along the way as well.But what's intriguing is that while you value one set of traits in a new friend, another person could value that exact same friend for a completely different set of traits. While I may value our shared love for collecting frog figurines, another person might be following you because you just live in the same city that they do. So neither I nor your local friend have a complete picture of the value of your online presence. Therefore, each person has created their own taxonomy of you -- a classification based on certain characteristics that are derived from your relationship with them.A "folksonomy" is a loose term used to describe the process of people collaborating to tag and organize items, much like you see on sites like Flickr, for example. The theory is that by putting our heads together as a social media community, we're more likely to accurately describe photos using tagging with keywords and that the totality of these tags yields a more legitimate description of that item to the rest of the world.In this blog series, we'll take the notion of folksonomy one step further to "metafolksonomy" -- the process of classifying the classifiers;in short -- people tagging. We all have our own taxonomies that individuals have created based on our relationship with them. We create "folksonomies" of objects on sites like Flickr and Delicious based on a join effort of humans classifying objects. And at the deepest of collaboration is humans classifying humans jointly.How does metafolksonomy fit into the social media environment? How could we benefit from solutions that implement this concept?And to you, the reader -- what questions do you have about this concept that we should explore?
