Towards a Knowledge Society: Is Knowledge a Public Good? Dynamics of Knowledge Production and Distribution When Taxonomy Meets Folksonomy: Towards Hybrid Classification of Knowledge?

The last five years have witnessed a sustained evolution of information technologies, coupled with a massive democratization of the production, the publication and the diffusion of electronic contents. The wide distribution of simplified editing tools and user-friendly electronic exchange platforms (blogs, wikis, etc) has led to a steep rise of online available information. The exponential growth of the number of information sources, as well as their strong heterogeneity in terms of quality and relevance raises the question of the readability and the accessibility of the online contents. In this context, we could make the hypothesis that the retrievability and the usability of information will rank among the critical issues related to knowledge diffusion.