Comments on: Ontology is Overrated by Clay Shirky

I found Shirky's article on classification and categorization very interesting. In particular, however, I enjoyed reading about non-classification, as well as user-classification and tag relation. It makes sense that uses would rather use Google's search engine than Yahoo's structured framework for browsing. Many obsucre things, like, as Shirky points out, "obstreperous Minnesota," would be hard to find and classify in a rigid categorized system, but would be easy to find on a search engine that works on keywords and what websites other people interested in "obstreperous Minnesota" visited. Also, people like to be free to create their own categorizations, they don't want to be constrained to how Yahoo categorizes reality.

This leads into the second part of the article that really interests me, user tags to classify information. Instead of Yahoo's system of building the categorization system and then adding websites where they fit, tagging is dynamic. When a user tags a website they visited with certain keywords specific to that exact webpage, those keywords can be any (and any amount of) word(s) in the dictionary. This breaks free of the rigid classification system and allows for an ever changing dynamic system where pages are linked by these tags. Another part of this I found interesting is how sites like del.ico.us link keywords that may be synonyms based if many users gave websites the same tags. As Shirky puts it, "A lot of users tagging things foobar are also tagging them frobnitz. I'll tell the user foobar and frobnitz are related." In doing so, these sites are categorizing based off their users', rather than their own, views of reality.