Tagging & folksonomy genieten steeds meer belangstelling. Ik ontdekte een weblog die helemaal aan tagging is gewijd: You’re it!

Vorige week schreef Clay Shirky: … This spring, I gave a pair of talks on opposite coasts on the subject of categorization and tagging. The first was entitled Ontology Is Overrated, given at the O’Reilly ETech conference in March. Then, in April I gave a talk at IMCExpo called “Folksonomies & Tags: The rise of user-developed classification.” I’ve just put up an edited concatenation of those two talks, coupled with invaluable editorial suggestions from Alicia Cervini. It’s called Ontology is Overrated – Categories, Links, and Tags. Here’s the intro:

Today I want to talk about categorization, and I want to convince you that a lot of what we think we know about categorization is wrong. In particular, I want to convince you that many of the ways we’re attempting to apply categorization to the electronic world are actually a bad fit, because we’ve adopted habits of mind that are left over from earlier strategies.…

» lees verder op zijn weblog

Uit zijn artikel (waar hij op zijn weblog naar verwijst) haal ik de volgende quote die je hopelijk aanzet tot lezen van het hele artikel.

It comes down ultimately to a question of philosophy. Does the world make sense or do we make sense of the world? If you believe the world makes sense, then anyone who tries to make sense of the world differently than you is presenting you with a situation that needs to be reconciled formally, because if you get it wrong, you’re getting it wrong about the real world.

If, on the other hand, you believe that we make sense of the world, if we are, from a bunch of different points of view, applying some kind of sense to the world, then you don’t privilege one top level of sense-making over the other. What you do instead is you try to find ways that the individual sense-making can roll up to something which is of value in aggregate, but you do it without an ontological goal. You do it without a goal of explicitly getting to or even closely matching some theoretically perfect view of the world. … It’s all dependent on human context. This is what we’re starting to see with del.icio.us, with Flickr, with systems that are allowing for and aggregating tags. The signal benefit of these systems is that they don’t recreate the structured, hierarchical categorization so often forced onto us by our physical systems. Instead, we’re dealing with a significant break — by letting users tag URLs and then aggregating those tags, we’re going to be able to build alternate organizational systems, systems that, like the Web itself, do a better job of letting individuals create value for one another, often without realizing it.

» Ontology is Overrated - Categories, Links, and Tags

» You’re It! Aanrader!

P.S. Steve Rubel signaleerde deze weblog al op 30 april. Was me TOTAAAAAL niet opgevallen