Another winner: Folksonomy is one of NY Times' ideas of the year

Congratulations to Thomas Vander Wal for having his neologism 'folksonomy' featured in the 'Year in Ideas' issue of the New York Times!

Not convinced about folksonomies? As the item says:

People aren't really categorizing information," Vander Wal says. "They're throwing words out there for their own use." But the cumulative force of all the individual tags can produce a bottom-up, self-organized system for classifying mountains of digital material.

Now, that's a powerful idea, isn't it? Well done, Thomas!

The rest of the list is a bit weird. There are some good ideas, like the readable medicine bottle, do-it-yourself cartography and the man who discovered why yawning is contageous (usability people beware; it's to do with empathy!), but I wasn't so sure about in-vitro meat (apparently co-developed by NASA and some Dutch scientists) or, for that matter 2-dimensional food.

Still, I guess they are all signs-of-the-Times, and folksonomies is one of them.