Shirky: Ontology is Overrated — Categories, Links, and Tags
Quotable bits:
“My God. It’s full of links:
the URL gives us a way to create a globally unique ID for anything we need to point to”“Great Minds don’t think alike:
By forgoing formal classification, tags enable a huge amount of user-produced organizational value, at vanishingly small cost.”“Market Logic:
If you find a way to make it valuable to individuals to tag their stuff, you’ll generate a lot more data about any given object than if you pay a professional to tag it once and only once.”“Signal Loss from Expression:
With tagging, when there is signal loss, it comes from people not having any commonality in talking about things.
With a multiplicity of points of view the question isn’t “Is everyone tagging any given link ‘correctly’”, but rather “Is anyone tagging it the way I do?”
If there is no shelf, then even imagining that there is one right way to organize things is an error.”“Filtering done post hoc:
In a world where publishing is cheap, putting something out there says nothing about its quality. It’s what happens after it gets published that matters. If people don’t point to it, other people won’t read it.”
Start using del.icio.us seriously!
Posted by markp at June 21, 2005 03:16 PM