[IxDA Discuss] categories, sections, tags

[Christina Wodtke]

Yeah, I saw that floating around the first time.  It's full of slander, 
great ideas, misconceptions and impractical insight.

His article is not real world enough for my needs though. Ordinary 
people have a model of how the world works, that is slowly evolved over 
time... Shelf space is a metaphor that is easy and readily understood. 
Things have location. But as you become more digitally minded, you 
realize things have qualities more than location (or rather, location is 
just a stand in for a facet of its nature).

I think my answer will lie somewhere in between... content that looks 
like it has homes, then as the user's mental model evolves, perhaps they 
discover that those bits of content can live many places.

Jeff Howard wrote:
> [Please voluntarily trim replies to include only relevant quoted material.]
>
> Clay Shirky wrote an article a while back that talked about this
> problem.
>
> Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags
> http://www.shirky.com/writings/ontology_overrated.html
>
> "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."
>
> // jeff
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-- 
Christina Wodtke
Principal Instigator

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