30th May 2005
There Is No Shelf
A couple of years ago, I wrote Topics, Categories, Keywords, and Konfusion, out of a sense of bewilderment. You simply can’t come up with a categorization scheme where everything is nicely tucked away in one place. The problem stems from how different people think about the same thing (quick: “Overturned Red Hummer!” — what category?) Not only that, but the same person thinks about the same thing in different ways, depending on context (”Norte Dame is a historic church - a French National Treasure”, versus “I will meet you at the ice cream stand in front of Notre Dame, and then we will get some dinner”).
Context is everything.
So I was really happy to come across Clay Shirky’s recent “Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags” essay. He goes into a lot more depth (and it’s much better written :-) The Yahoo vs Google comparison is very interesting (”There Is No Filesystem”). It illustrates the differences between what I would call “Old Guard” thinking (something can only appear in three places, as if there were some sort of physical shelf), and recognition of what the web is good at (we find phrases, we match words, we might find related documents, why tagging works)
A couple of years ago, I wrote Topics, Categories, Keywords, and Konfusion, out of a sense of bewilderment. You simply can’t come up with a categorization scheme where everything is nicely tucked away in one place. The problem stems from how different people think about the same thing (quick: “Overturned Red Hummer!” — what category?) Not only that, but the same person thinks about the same thing in different ways, depending on context (”Norte Dame is a historic church - a French National Treasure”, versus “I will meet you at the ice cream stand in front of Notre Dame, and then we will get some dinner”).
Context is everything.
So I was really happy to come across Clay Shirky’s recent “Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags” essay. He goes into a lot more depth (and it’s much better written :-) The Yahoo vs Google comparison is very interesting (”There Is No Filesystem”). It illustrates the differences between what I would call “Old Guard” thinking (something can only appear in three places, as if there were some sort of physical shelf), and recognition of what the web is good at (we find phrases, we match words, we might find related documents, why tagging works)
