May 30, 2005

clay shirky on tagging

3 Comments

More words from The Mas­ter: “Onto­logy is Ove­rra­ted: Cate­go­ries, Links, and Tags.”

What I think is coming ins­tead are much more orga­nic ways of orga­ni­zing infor­ma­tion than our current cate­go­ri­za­tion sche­mes allow, based on two units — the link, which can point to anything, and the tag, which is a way of attaching labels to links. The stra­tegy of tag­ging — free-form labe­ling, without regard to cate­go­ri­cal cons­traints — seems like a recipe for disas­ter, but as the Web has shown us, you can extract a sur­pri­sing amount of value from big messy data sets.

Pay atten­tion, Sig.

3 Responses to “clay shirky on tagging”

  1. Jackson Miller says:
    May 30, 2005 at 2:49 am

    Where Soft­ware and Busi­ness Coexist

    In case you haven’t noti­ced from the con­glo­me­ra­tion of topics that I post about, I am inte­res­ted in soft­ware and busi­ness (and mar­ke­ting, Nash­vi­lle, open-ness, …). I subsc­ri­bed to a new feed whose tagline is “Busi­ness, Soft­ware, Mana­ge­ment & more”.

  2. steven streight aka vaspers the grate says:
    May 30, 2005 at 6:34 am

    I like David Weinberger’s sta­te­ment at JOHO the Blog that the way we are orga­ni­zing too much infor­ma­tion is by crea­ting more infor­ma­tion.
    Now you also inform us that infor­ma­tion needs more infor­ma­tion added to it so we can for­mu­late the infor­ma­tion by which we need to be infor­med.
    If the human mind was sim­ple enough to unders­tand, we’d be too sim­ple to unders­tand it. I guess I’m too stu­pid to unders­tand how stu­pid I am.
    :^)
    Irony irons it all out I ran to tell Ron.

  3. sig says:
    May 30, 2005 at 9:53 am

    Ohh, I am, I am paying atten­tion…
    Tag­ging, grou­ping, lin­king, orga­ni­sing — iffy stuff to get right in theory, even more so in real life. So being prac­ti­cal chaps we’re prac­ti­cally having fun tes­ting twists to the prac­tice. Maybe it’ll work, maybe not. Then we’ll try some more… and more of the dif­fe­rent… then one day, perhaps :-)