Folknets

Shankar Gupta of Media Post does a great job summing up the new mininetworks bloggers are launching.

Though this didn’t make it into the article, Shankar was interested in the “folksonomies” angle of these networks, since the bloggers themselves build/maintain the categorical groupings rather than relying any third-party authority wielding some Platonic taxonomy. (Wikipedia defines folksonomy as “a group of people cooperating spontaneously to organize information into categories, noted because it is almost completely unlike traditional formal methods of faceted classification.”)

The right word hasn’t yet emerged to describe the bottom-up aspect of these blogger-organized networks — mininets, nanonetworks, ad hoc networks, blogger networks? Maybe “folk networks” or “folknets” captures the spirit?

To remind you, here are the networks currently running:
NewYawkers
Sports
Gay
College hoops
Baseball
Evangelicals
New England Entertainment
Food blogs
LA
Philly
Economics
North Carolina
TV
Liberals
Republican Women
Law
Gossip
Music
Gadgets
Liberal women