The title of this item is from Clay Shirky’s article Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags.
I had real trouble putting this post in a category. I wish I didn’t have them. Action: migrate to blog tool with tags.
Clay’s latest excellent essay provides a detailed analysis of the influence that storage media have had on categorisation. It’s the same problem that kept the long tail invisible from us: what you find out about the world is determined by what will fit on a shelf. Now that we don’t need shelves any more, we can organise stuff in more flexible ways. As Shirky says, “tags enable a huge amount of user-produced organizational value, at vanishingly small cost.”
But that isn’t the only problem. Even the Web has been categorised in hierarchical directories. These have the problems that they are created by a subgroup who have a particular point of view. Worse, they have tended to inherit some of the rules from the physical world like “an item can only be in N categories”.
The central idea in this essay is that “The Only Group That Can Categorize Everything Is Everybody”. After describing some of the limitations of categorisation, it goes on to list some of the enormous strengths of the deceptively simple technology of tagging.
Effectively, it is already easier to find information on the Web than it is on a typical organisational network, or even on most individual computers. The use of user defined tags seems likely to make it an order of magnitude easier again. Apple’s Tiger OS, Google Desktop Search and Microsoft’s plans all go a long way to solving the desktop problem.
>From a KM point of view, the key question that this raises is “how can we allow our members to tag our content?”.