Group items tagged

Yahoo is saying "We understand better than you how the world is organized, because we are trained professionals. So if you mistakenly think that Books and Literature are entertainment, we'll put a little flag up so we can set you right, but to see those links, you have to 'go' to where they 'are'."

You don't have to have just a few links, you could have a whole lot of links.

A URL can only appear in three places. That's the Yahoo rule.

They missed the end of this progression, which is that, if you've got enough links, you don't need the hierarchy anymore. There is no shelf. There is no file system. The links alone are enough.

One reason Google was adopted so quickly when it came along is that Google understood there is no shelf, and that there is no file system. Google can decide what goes with what after hearing from the user, rather than trying to predict in advance what it is you need to know.

"Well, that's going to be a useful category, we should encode that in advance."

They point to the signal loss from the fact that users, although they use these three different labels, are talking about the same thing.

You can also turn that list around. You can say "Here are some characteristics where ontological classification doesn't work well": Domain Large corpus No formal categories Unstable entities Unrestricted entities No clear edges Participants Uncoordinated users Amateur users Naive catalogers No Authority

The other big problem is that predicting the future turns out to be hard, and yet any classification system meant to be stable over time puts the categorizer in the position of fortune teller.

Here is del.icio.us, Joshua Shachter's social bookmarking service. It's for people who are keeping track of their URLs for themselves, but who are willing to share globally a view of what they're doing, creating an aggregate view of all users' bookmarks, as well as a personal view for each user.

" If you find a way to make it valuable to individuals to tag their stuff, you'll generate a lot more data about any given object than if you pay a professional to tag it once and only once.

Tags are simply labels for URLs, selected to help the user in later retrieval of those URLs. Tags have the additional effect of grouping related URLs together. There is no fixed set of categories or officially approved choices. You can use words, acronyms, numbers, whatever makes sense to you, without regard for anyone else's needs, interests, or requirements.

The chart shows a great variability in tagging strategies among the various users.

But this is what organization looks like when you turn it over to the users -- many different strategies, each of which works in its own context, but which can also be merged.

We are moving away from binary categorization -- books either are or are not entertainment

But they either had no way of reflecting that debate or they decided not to expose it to the users. What instead happened was it became an all-or-nothing categorization, "This is entertainment, this is not entertainment." We're moving away from that sort of absolute declaration, and towards being able to roll up this kind of value by observing how people handle it in practice.

What you do instead is you try to find ways that the individual sense-making can roll up to something which is of value in aggregate, but you do it without an ontological goal.

you believe that we make sense of the world, if we are, from a bunch of different points of view, applying some kind of sense to the world

we're going to be able to build alternate organizational systems, systems that, like the Web itself, do a better job of letting individuals create value for one another, often without realizing it.