Links & tags

By Jesper Hundebøl — In a very well written and even entertaining article about the subtleties of ontologies Clay Shirky (shirky.com) explains why links and tags are hot, categories not.

categories

Categories – according to the rather interesting cases forwarded – limit or fix our world-view. Tags and links, on the other hand, sets us free. Yahoo – or in Denmark jubii – are based on categories; websites are placed in certain categories, i.e., according to the content of those webpages. Like books in a library... Google, on the other hand, is based on links (URL's) and the tags people attach to those links. Its browse vs. search.

del.icio.us

While a lot of people may know about this, fewer are likely to know much about del.icio.us – a social bookmarks manager that allows users to add web pages they like to their "personal collection of links, to categorize (sic!) those sites with keywords"... I saw it first time in january, when Robin Good mentioned it as one of ten technologies that would work for future ICT-supported/based learning.

Del.icio.us is a social software tool based on the users free and spontaneous interest in sharing links. As links are added - and tagged – the software will automatically allow for users to identify others users who share the same interest. Del.icio.us is about collecting links, but it is as such also about making links between people.

I have a hard time liking del.icio.us – although according to both Shirky and Good I should. Del.icio.us is first of all not delicious and like this site (some critics think) its not very user-friendly. However, I agree it holds lots of potential for e.g. larger organisations - and online communities - to share and distribute knowledge about webbased content.

based on scale

Coming back to Shirky's writings... The free-form tagging of links, or URL's, conveys power to the users, because "with tagging, anyone is free to use the words he or she thinks are appropriate. ... Instead of having massive categorizations and then specialty categorization, we're going to have a spectrum between them, based on the size and make-up of various tagging groups." Contrary to categorization schemes, tagging "gets better with scale". Yes, indeed!

Actually the system requires scale. Without a sufficient number of links and tags, a system like del.icio.us would not offer much of the above mentioned advantages, because the inherent anarchy in the system might result in too far-reaching tags (semantically speaking) attached to too few links?

Move on--

shirky.com/writings/ontology_overrated.html :-D
del.icio.us
blog entries about ontologies and the semantic web...

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