Dave Doesn't Get It
He then went on to talk about the Dewey Decimal System being great because it's so constrained. To his credit, he mentioned that the BBS'05 site has some reference to tags, notably the Flickr tag site. He makes the excellent point that sites like Technorati or Flickr that use tags, the tag link takes you AWAY from the site using them.
He's talking about business blogging adding value and building community, yet ignoring the value of the net of building ad-hoc selective, responsive communities. No standard taxonomy for tags? Sure. That could be a feature, for folks to tag about a party or the word of the day. Technorati tracking 'millions' of tags? Sure. Blah blah Moore's Law blah blah Zingiber. Come on!
For all you Dewey Decimal fans out there, I have one word: Z39.50. There's a reason why the Library of Congress wanted 'on beyond Dewey'.
Joshua, you should mail Dave and tell him about del.icio.us because if all he sees is Technorati and FlickR, he's not going to understand WHY tagging works and is useful.
posted by Strata Chalup at 8/17/2005 04:24:00 PM
3 Comments:
We can certainly agree to disagree, and I'm cool with that. But, sorry, you'll see, in 12 months we won't be doing this "tagger" thing at all. It'll either be completely subsumed into the process of creating blog entries (which I find unlikely because then we'd need to be automatically able to summarize and extract keywords, a problem that even Google hasn't fully figured out) or it'll be so overloaded that people will tag every word in their articles, "just in case".
OK, this is why I shouldn't post in a hurry. I'll let my friend js7a who commented on a mirror of this blog, set you straight:
"Z39.50 isn't a cataloging system, it's an information retrieval protocol for library catalogs. It's pretty bulky, and very much designed by committee, and has much more in common with WAIS than Altavista/Lycos/Google-class indices.
href="http://www.loc.gov/cgi-bin/zgate?ACTION=INIT&FORM_HOST_PORT=/prod/w
ww/data/z3950/locils.html,z3950.loc.gov,7090&CI=215447">This is the Z39.50 idea of an "advanced" search.
You're thinking of the
href="http://www.loc.gov/catdir/cpso/lcco/lcco.html">Library of Congress Classification System, which is ontologically much like the Dewey Decimal system.
The tension is between limited and free descriptors. Limted descriptors take a lot more time to get right; free descriptors are hard to search on well.
Jo, this is what del.icio.us is and does-- folks post links that THEY find, and tag them. It's a community tagsonomy (or, if one prefers, folksonomy).
Post a Comment
<< Home