A poor but simple example is Digg, but don't take that too literally, it's not my complete vision.

It's a site populated by users posting (mostly) news links. Large numbers of users interact with the posts by "Digg"ing them or "Bury"ing them which sort of acts as a preference filter, that is, increases the likelihood of you finding good stuff because it is popular within the community and/or related in some way to something you previously "Dugg".

Popular is not the correct word really, and we're talking about more than just 'like' and 'dislike' (though important too), we're talking about a complex classification system driven by the interests and observations of individuals, which need not agree with each other. Users classify what is meaningful to them.

Say I post a picture of my very handsome beagle Merle sitting on my deck. I would tag it "dog, beagle, Merle". Then maybe a carpenter sees it and appreciates the deck and he adds the tag "deck, balusters, post tops". Then a gardener notices... "geranium, zinnia"...

The Art Museum Community Cataloging Project seeks to resolve the disparity between museum professionals' terminology to those of regular folks, which rarely match. "...social tagging may provide profound new ways to describe and access cultural heritage collections and encourage visitor engagement with collection objects."

With folk music, our unapproachable lexicon is lingual, geographical, cultural, generational and even familial, to name just a few. We're having a global conversation here, and what we find meaningful varies wildly, and oh so beautifully, between us.

Now mind you this is merely a filter, it does not actually alter any of the data. It can be used or not, or anywhere in between, totally up to the user. And with the exception of the blatant stuff, nothing is actually deleted. Emphasis is all we are manipulating.

The Folk Process 2.0