Folksonomy

Other museums geared toward children such as the Natural History Museum in London have entire sections of their websites dedicated to kids and often feature online games designed to engage and educate children. But other types of museums such as the Brooklyn Museum (which attracts a crowd similar to that of the MASS Moca) have realized that through gaming, the museum and the visitor can enter a mutually beneficial relationship. Folksonomy (referred to here as social tagging) is the practice and method of collaboratively creating and managing tags to annotate and categorize content. Non-expert users can classify as well as find information (this is how the MASS Moca blogger mentioned above found Flickr photos of that specific installation). Museums can use social tagging to help visitors find what they are looking for in an online collection. The Brooklyn Museum found a way to get people to help tag their collection by combining game mechanics with community membership to create a social tagging experience which they call Posse. After signing up, creating a profile, and becoming a part of the Posse community, users can play a game of, you guessed it, Tag. Posse members accrue points for each tag they assign to an object and are notified when they pass another member's score. The game also integrates videos with messages from the Brooklyn Museum staff that pop up when a Posse member reaches certain levels.

Below this and every other post on this blog you can see a set of tags or labels. For example, if you click on the words "MASS Moca" below, you will be brought to a page displaying all posts tagged with that term.