screenshot: shirky.com
Clay Shirky wrote a really interessting article about the problems of classifications:
“Today I want to talk about categorization, and I want to convince you that a lot of what we think we know about categorization is wrong. In particular, I want to convince you that many of the ways we’re attempting to apply categorization to the electronic world are actually a bad fit, because we’ve adopted habits of mind that are left over from earlier strategies. (…)
Now, anyone who deals with categorization for a living will tell you they can never get a perfect system. In working classification systems, success is not “Did we get the ideal arrangement?” but rather “How close did we come, and on what measures?” The idea of a perfect scheme is simply a Platonic ideal. However, I want to argue that even the ontological ideal is a mistake. Even using theoretical perfection as a measure of practical success leads to misapplication of resources.(…)
It’s all dependent on human context. This is what we’re starting to see with del.icio.us, with Flickr, with systems that are allowing for and aggregating tags. The signal benefit of these systems is that they don’t recreate the structured, hierarchical categorization so often forced onto us by our physical systems. Instead, we’re dealing with a significant break — by letting users tag URLs and then aggregating those tags, we’re going to be able to build alternate organizational systems, systems that, like the Web itself, do a better job of letting individuals create value for one another, often without realizing it.”
related links
“The User Advocate: Interactive Prototyping – Part 1: Easy PDF Prototyping”
