"When is this stuff going to get into our desktops" - Isn't this the Big Idea behind all this debate on folksonomies/tags/whatever? Well said, Anselm. Anselm Hook wrote: Couple of comments:To add to Clay's post - I'd like to add the idea of the 'platypus effect'; that the way we categorize affects the way we think. When we discover something that doesn't fit into our categories it seems odd. If we (in the west) had discovered the playtpus first then our categorization might have accomodated it more clearly without it crossing so many boundaries. This lensing effect affects many practices; biology, anthropology, law etc. Some people might say the platypus effect is evidence that humans classify using disjoint categories - but I think it is more that we just don't have well defined 'patches' over that part of our apprehension of the world. Humans seem to be pretty good at thinking about 10 contradictory things before breakfast. And to detract a bit from same post - My complaint is that the points made therein are old and that the motion on them has been so slow. It is nice to see these stories, they have a wonderful campfire story quality to them - telling us all something that we've heard before and will likely hear again - but the lethargy of modern operating systems to catch up with these ideas is frustrating to say the least. I'd like to have personal categorization software with the speed and ease of a native windowed desktop operating system... I'm tired of clunky web interfaces that only manage one kind of thing. That it took del to break ground here is wonderful but... when is this stuff going to get into our desktops - and start to deal with the other qualifiers we use every day? I'd like to be able to set contraints like 'all things tagged blue, of this mime type, in this date range and authored while I was in france' etc. I'd like this to be the primary way I order _all_ my stuff... not just a novelty for my bookmarks. It is so matter of fact and so simple that it is scarely worth mentioning... yet operating systems that do this are still not out yet. - a On Tue, 17 May 2005, Randy Fischer wrote:I personally don't think ontologies are useless for categorizing, though I'll admit that they are overrated. In fact they are mostly arbitrary. One of the things that disturbed me most about hypertexts when I first started reading them (Eastgate texts actually) was that I never felt sure I'd covered the graph. So I've always liked the idea of one distinguished, though arbitrary, spanning tree. It's OK if my ontology is different from yours. In fact, I have several of my own, all mixed together (tags give me this). So it's really a blend of heirarchies - in fact, over time I incorporate other's peoples habits of organization as I learn about a subject. And that's one of the things that intrigues me about delicious - the possibility of my own evolving spanning trees for all my information, and everyone else's. Of course the "assorted unsortables" seems to be the biggest category, and I'm not so worried about covering the entire graph anymore ;) Just thinking out loud. -Randy Fischer On 5/17/05, Gen Kanai <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:Clay's newest piece has a lot on many topics relevant to our mailing list including del.icio.us itself. Highly recommended reading. http://shirky.com/writings/ontology_overrated.html _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.del.icio.us/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss_______________________________________________ discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.del.icio.us/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss_______________________________________________ discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.del.icio.us/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss -- Dave Lovely http://ramage.typepad.com/ramage/ |
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