Folksonomies – Collaborative Classification

There has been a lot of traffic on this new meme "Folksonomies". This Slashdot bit has many of the important links in it, and I can't say that I've read all of it, so what I am describing below may be old hat. I am thinking that while Folksonomies is a kind of catchy, although hard to say or spell word, it is too narrow. Folksonomies, as I understand, refers to a community based way of arriving at a taxonomy of information, basically subjective judgements on what the information is " about." We've seen this in http://del.icio.us and in http://www.flickr.com. It seems to me that there are all kinds of meta data, some subjective, and some objective, which could use the general idea of collaborative classification. For example within BlogBridge, a blog reader, we are building the ability for any user to identify the Country of origin of a certain feed. This is an objective fact, but not one that is easily ascertained. We want to use the knowledge of the community to find out this fact. The experiment is to let any user record what they think the right country is, and relying (or betting) that this will be self-policing, and that people will not be inclined to hack or vandalize this item of information. I think this is a useful generalization of the notion of folksonomies. Whether the term Collaborative Classification is a better will be decided by the mysterious dynamics of blog-meme-flow.