Clay Shirky responds to Louis Rosenfeld’s piece on taxonomies vs. folksonomies. Lou argues that folksonomies aren’t as searchable and may not scale, but, he writes, treating both “as major parts of a single metadata ecology might expose a useful symbiosis.” Clay responds that economics weighs heavily on the side of folksonomies, since taxonomies and controlled vocabularies are so expensive to build and maintain. And Clay points to what I think is the most important point: We are just at the beginning of inventing folksonomies. Del.icio.us, for example, doesn’t yet show us how other people have tagged the page we’ve just bookmarked, which inhibits consistency in tagging. (On the other hand, that might encourage a tyranny of the majority in the development of folksonomies.) We are way early in the development of folksonomies. Exciting adventures in classification science await us. The game is afoot!

In any case, I haven’t done justice to either Lou or Clay’s post. Go ahead and give ’em a read…

Matthew Stoller has started a blog supporting Simon Rosenberg for chair of the Democratic National Committee. I don’t know enough about Rosenberg to have an opinion, but I have a lot of respect for Matthew’s judgment.

Categories: Uncategorized dw