The monthly IA meeting and dinner, (OK, dinner and talking shop) always tosses up interesting ideas and last night's event turned up a conversation between Thomas Vander Wal and Gene Smith with kibbitzing from Clay Shirky on folksonomy.
If the net is doing anything at all it is creating neologisms like weeds.
Its Thomas's term to describe the kind of thing going on at Furl, Spurl, Deliciousm Flikr etc where the Google-like power of very large numbers enables dumb systems to generate meaningful relationships. Folksonomies.
Whatever you call it, Shirky's elucidation is, as usual, clear, comprehensible and elegant. I especially go for this line;
I am predicting that, as with the earlier arc of knowledge management, the question of meaningful markup is going to move away from canonical and a priori to contextual and a posteriori value.
Exactly, we are going to stop wasting people's time and brainpower trying to cover all the semantic exits and accept that many feet create the path. Gene suggests that the lack of precision and the absence of synonym control generated by allowing people to create their own categories is a problem. I go with Shirky, its a benefit because if you use the URL as the anchor point for all the categories to which it is assigned, you can open up a whole world of meaning.
Maybe 60% of those who link to the page label it as one of three or four kinds of information, but the remaining 40% don't necessarily agree, or apply other, related terms; synonyms by emergence. The synonyms generate themselves at one end of the scale, and, at the other, you will find the hooks that attach this page to whole new regions of knowledge to which you might not assume it had any relevance. Perfect, or to use Clay's statement of it;
heirarchy is good for creating non-overlapping but all-inclusive buckets. In a file-system world-view, both of those are desirable characteristics, but in a web world-view, where objects have handles rather than containment paths, neither characteristic is necessary. ... If heirarchy was a good way to organize links, Yahoo would be king of the hill and Google an also-ran service.
How often have you been walking through a public park and seen the beautifully curved pathway, or the carefully laid out intersection being ignored while thousands of feet take the human route, across the grass if needed? Nobody "decides" what the path should be, but very quickly a few people decline to be regimented by the designer and pretty soon most of us are following.
We do it in the public space of a park, we will do it in the public space of the net, and it will be efficient as well as consonant with our actual needs, as distinct from the theoretical constructs of a few minds.
BTW, I love what Thomas Vander Wal is doing with permalinks, how come no-one did anything about it till now?
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