Since installing OS X 10.4, I’ve been using a very similar system to what Giles Turnbull describes in Folksonomise your files with Automator. You can enter metadata (here, in the form of space-separated tags) into the file’s “Spotlight Comments” field that will be searched in any Spotlight query. This is great, and it (along with Spotlight in general) is changing the way I store and access files. When I download a reference PDF, I just throw it into my “docs” directory, tag it in the Spotlight Comments, and forget about it.

The article leads me to think, though, about how the buzzword-hungry internets seem to be mashing the terms “folksonomy” and “tag” into the same thing. Tags are a terrific way to organize data, as the break out of the more restrictive hierarchical structures (like a directory tree on your hard drive), and allow you to associate multiple pieces of information with a particular item (like a file).

A folksonomy, though, introduces a subtle but important distinction in that it describes an emergent vocabulary that evolves as a group of people apply their own categorizations to a shared item. del.icio.us is an example of folksonomy, and it has radically improved my efficiency when performing certain kinds of web seraches. While organizing files in this way is a tremendous shift in personal organization, it is clearly not a folksonomy.