Clay Shirky here. I’ve been writing about tagging since late 2003, when I first wrote about del.icio.us over on Many-to-Many (a group weblog about social software.) By way of introduction, here are excerpts from some of my M2M posts on the subject of tagging and folksonomy:
Folksonomies + controlled vocabularies: “The advantage of folksonomies isn’t that they’re better than controlled vocabularies, it’s that they’re better than nothing, because controlled vocabularies are not extensible to the majority of cases where tagging is needed.”
Folksonomies are a forced move: “It doesn’t matter whether we “accept” folksonomies, because we’re not going to be given that choice. The mass amateurization of publishing means the mass amateurization of cataloging is a forced move.”
The Innovator’s Lemma: “If we’re going to let just any old person write whatever they want and then make it available globally, we’re going to have to extend the same freedom to classifying the resulting flood of material. And critics will be able to say, rightly, that such a system will lack the coherence we would have had, had we not gone and let everyone publish willy-nilly. To which the only sensible reply is “Oh well.”
Tags != folksonomies && Tags != Flat name spaces: “This last point is key — the number one fucked up thing about ontology, out of a rich list of such things, is the need to declare today what category contains what as a prediction about the future. … A system that requires you to predict the future up front is guaranteed to get worse over time.”
Folksonomy: The Soylent Green of the 21st Century: “Every time you pick between the Heinz and the Del Monte, it’s like clicking a link, the simplest possible informative transaction. Your choice says “The Heinz, at $2.25 per 28 oz., is a better buy than the Del Monte at $1.89.” This is so simple it doesn’t seem like you’re producing metadata at all — you’re just getting ketchup for your fish sticks. … That looks like cheap metadata to me. And the secret is that that metadata is created through aggregate interaction.”
What, no categories or tags of any kind attached to this post?
Comment by xian — April 29, 2005 @ 6:10 pm
I agree. Jerome’s Keywords plugin for WordPress is great: http://vapourtrails.ca/wp-keywords
Also, only flickr and del.icio.us are listed in the sidebar. I think you’re missing a few http://www.faganfinder.com/id/?q=tag:shirky
Comment by mfagan — April 30, 2005 @ 11:48 pm
Ah, thanks! We were definitely wanting a good plugin for tagging. Also added several of those sites to the sidebar.
Comment by Administrator — May 1, 2005 @ 3:50 am
[...] on, here are excerpts from some of my M2M posts on the subject of tagging and folksonomy: You’re It! » Blog Archive » Introduction: Clay Shirky [...]
Pingback by HYPERGURU » You’re It! » Blog Archive » Introduction: Clay Shirky — May 1, 2005 @ 5:17 pm
So who do I have to suck up to in order to get Tagsurf on that sidebar?
Comment by Anthony Eden — May 1, 2005 @ 11:39 pm
[...] on, here are excerpts from some of my M2M posts on the subject of tagging and folksonomy: You’re It! » Blog Archive » Introduction: Clay Shirky [...]
Pingback by HYPERGURU » You’re It! » Blog Archive » Introduction: Clay Shirky — May 2, 2005 @ 3:04 am
You should be interested by my new site –> http://creative-mobs.com/portal/tag/YOUR-TAG-HERE
The RSS should be quite useful.
Enjoy !
Comment by felix — May 2, 2005 @ 8:59 am
Comparing ontology in general to the Library of Congress catalog is like saying cars are no good by examining the predecessors of the Model A. I know of no one that has proposed that catalog as an upper ontology – for this reason – was created to locate books. Oh wait, that’s its chief fault you say!
There is no reason that an ontology cannot evolve, or be generated out of data. No ontology need be permanent, or global. All the benefits of tagsonomies you promote could be obtained with personal, evolving, flexible ontologies.
Rarely is an ontology created to predict the future, rather most are created after examining the past and the world. They tend to emerge from data by human reason.
The longest lasting ones are exactly those that are based on the most careful examination of phenomena, such as Newtonian Mechanics, and are extremely useful.
Nothing in your recent statements says anything about ontologies really, except to point out the need for evolving, flexible, automatically maintained and merged personal ontologies.
http://kashori.com
Comment by John Black — May 2, 2005 @ 7:40 pm
Is anybody else having trouble with the first three links?
Comment by dphiffer — May 3, 2005 @ 11:22 am