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Ontology is Overrated

Clay Shirky has published an Essay entitled Ontology is Overrated — Categories, Links, and Tags. It does a great job of summarizing the pro-folksonomy/tagging arguments. A sample:

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.

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This entry was posted on Monday, May 16th, 2005 at 4:28 pm and is filed under The Net. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

2 Responses to “Ontology is Overrated”

  1. Mike Says:
    June 24th, 2005 at 3:08 pm

    I have to completely agree with Clay Shirky. It is a wonderful post that inspired us to take tagging to the next level. I agree that basic categorization is dead. However, tagging also lacks some organization. The UI on del.icio.us for example is very hard to use. Blinklist tried to attempt to take it to the next level. Would love to hear your thoughts on the personal user pages that list tags by favorites, popular, and most recent.

  2. ryan Says:
    June 24th, 2005 at 10:48 pm

    Basic categorization is done for the web. Remember, it still works in some places- the Library, medical schools, etc.