[Web4lib] del.icio.us tags and bookmarking sites -- WHY DO IT?

[Patricia F Anderson]

I'm not sure if folks here have already seen this essay which is relevant 
to this discussion.

Clay Shirky's Writings About the Internet: Ontology is Overrated: 
Categories, Links, and Tags: 
<http://shirky.com/writings/ontology_overrated.html>

"We're going to start to be able to subset our categorization schemes. 
Instead of having massive categorizations and then specialty 
categorization, we're going to have a spectrum between them, based on the 
size and make-up of various tagging groups."

"It comes down ultimately to a question of philosophy. Does the world make 
sense or do we make sense of the world? If you believe the world makes 
sense, then anyone who tries to make sense of the world differently than 
you is presenting you with a situation that needs to be reconciled 
formally, because if you get it wrong, you're getting it wrong about the 
real world."

Patricia Anderson, pfa at umich.edu