Folksonomies and internet self-categorization

I've been running into folksonomies a lot lately and it seems to be a common, new old, trend on the internet these days. There is a good article at Salon that summarizes where this (a.k.a tagging) is being used on the internet today and what great ideas have come as the result.

Flikr has been using them to categorize the images and improve searching. Speaking of which, one amazing related idea was by a creator of a game called ESP Game, which pairs users and presents them with a random image from the net and the users then try to describe this image in words. Upon a matching keyword you get points and move on to the next image; this allows to accurately categorize images; there is an experimental image search engine on that site ... quite amazing!

Finally another great idea is the 43 things social network site. It uses folksonomies to group people based on their goals and thus find people who have goals in common. This presents with a unique opportunity to work together and help each other to reach those goals. The idea is so incredible, I couldn't resist and signed up for it myself :)

This brings me back to the internet, there have been proposals in the research community, and to some extent examples can be already found on the net, for a the next web - Semantic Web - that organizes, categorizes and intelligently interlinks content together. This is supposed to be done externally by following specific standards; however, I wonder if there is a way through these folksonomies to somehow at least partially accomplish this internally through joint user efforts the like we've been seeing recently.