Classic essay by Vannevar Bush - shared bookmarks predicted in 1945 Oddly prescient, this essay by the father of the U.S. National Science Foundation is deservedly a classic. He speculates about a yet-to-be-invented machine which he calls a "memex" and describes it in a way which sounds a lot like a personal computer. Missing from the picture, but easy to imagine, is the Internet. But the image of scientists making "trails" of annotations and sharing them with each other is closely matched by ... surfers collecting bookmarks, tagging them using ad hoc tags, and sharing them via the internet. The stuff about the "memex" is only towards the end - skip to section 5 if you find the first pages boring. As is my habit, I have linked to the "printer friendly" version of the article. The authoritative location is . There are also various more or less legitimate copies all over the net. Oh, he misspelled "Hollerith". Sorry, couldn't resist noticing.

Ontology is Overrated: Links, Tags, and Post-hoc Metadata "The problem ontology solves is not how to organize ideas but how to organize things -- the Library of Congress's classification scheme exists not because concepts require consistent hierarchical placement, but because books do."

Ha ha, again somebody explaining why Clay Shirky is wrong

Categorization: Derived vs Applied I'm becoming skeptical of Clay Shirky but this observation makes some sense.

Some near-synonyms are just not synonyms "The cataloguers first reaction to that is, 'Oh my god, that means you won't be introducing the movies people to the cinema people!' To which the obvious answer is 'Good. The movie people don't want to hang out with the cinema people.' Those terms actually encode different things, and the assertion that restricting vocabularies improves signal assumes that that there's no signal in the difference itself, and no value in protecting the user from too many matches. When we get to really contested terms like queer/gay/homosexual, by this point, all the signal loss is in the collapse, not in the expansion. 'Oh, the people talking about "queer politics" and the people talking about "the homosexual agenda", they're really talking about the same thing.' Oh no they're not. If you think the movies and cinema people were going to have a fight, wait til you get the queer politics and homosexual agenda people in the same room."

See also folksonomies

See also folksonomy Stupid to have two separate tags, but that's how this place works ...

Some wishlist-type observations about The Competing Site