GuysBlog

Clay Shirky has a diverse background: art, drama, technology publishing, investing, education.  Recently, he presented "Ontology is Overrated" at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego and "Folksonomies &
Tags: The rise of user-developed classification" at the Interactive
Multimedia Culture Expo in New York.  Subsequently, he published a very insightful consolidation of the two as "Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags." He contrasts the original approach of Yahoo (top-down: categorize everything) with that of del.icio.us (bottom-up: tag everything). 

We create categories to help us to find things. Shirky points out that categorying schemes are by their nature transitory: the section of the Library of Congress scheme that used to be marked "Soviet Union" is now marked "Former Soviet Union.  There is no longer a political entity called Yugoslavia or East Germany. Where do books about them belong now?

Categories are connected with quantities and distinctions. Are there enough books about X to warrant giving X its own category? (Do we need another shelf?) Should a book about the history of film be filed under History or Film? (Which shelf should it be kept on?) Tags, plus the power of the computer and Internet, enable us to shift the decisions from the system to the users.  Long live metadata!

IBM is now encouraging its employees to use Mozilla Firefox as their browser, and also is encouraging them to blog [Thanks, Fred].