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Clay Shirky on Tagging
I just got off the phone with Clay Shirky, who I used to teach with at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program. I was interviewing him as part of the research Mike Liebhold and I are doing on context-awareness. Clay has been doing a lot of thinking about we organize information through categories, classifications, and tagging....
Clay was good enough to take the time to talk to me today, just a few days after returning from his mother-in-law's funeral in Switzerland.
The emerging debate between formal ontologies, or top-down professionally-designed categorization schemes like the Dewey decimal system, and folksonomies, or bottom-up classification schemes, is really starting to heat up, as Web 2.0 (the data web) grows rapidly - with Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP, its trivial and very low cost to deploy social tagging systems like del.icio.us (for bookmarks) and citeulike (for academic articles).
For a summary of what Clay and I talked about, you can read his recent article on "Ontology is Over-rated". Additional insights from our interview today will be incorporated into our report on context-awareness, due out this fall.