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The main thread of ontology in the philosophical sense is the study of entities and their relations.

A library catalog, for example,
assumes that for any new book, its logical place already exists within
the system, even before the book was published.

It's tempting to think that the classification schemes that libraries have optimized for in the past can be extended in an uncomplicated way into the digital world. This badly underestimates, in my view, the degree to which what libraries have historically been managing is an entirely different problem.

Thinking that library catalogs exist to organize concepts confuses the container for the thing contained.

hierarchy is a good way to manage physical objects.

simply a byproduct of physical constraints.

In the digital world, there is no physical constraint that's forcing this kind of organization on us any longer.

Now we have this ontologically managed list of what's out there.

It is perfectly possible for any number of links to be in any number of places in a hierarchy, or in many hierarchies, or in no hierarchy at all. But Yahoo decided to privilege one way of organizing links over all others, because they wanted to make assertions about what is "real."

there is no shelf, and that there is no file
system. Google can decide what goes with what after hearing from the user, rather than trying to predict in
advance what it is you need to know.

"Who cares? We're not going to tell the user what
to do, because the link structure is more complex than we can read,
except in response to a user query."

Browse versus search is a radical increase in the trust we put in link infrastructure, and in the degree of power derived from that link structure. Browse says the people making the ontology, the people doing the categorization, have the responsibility to organize the world in advance.

If you want something that hasn't been categorized in the way you think about it, you're out of luck.

search and categorization
side-by-side, fewer and fewer people were using categorization to find things.

then ontology is going to be a bad
strategy.

where the people doing the categorizing believe, even if only unconciously, that naming the world changes it. Unfortunately, most of the world is not actually amenable to voodoo categorization.

In environments where there's no authority and no force that
can be applied to the user, it's very difficult to support the voodoo style
of organization.

Merely naming the world creates no actual change, either in the world, or in the minds of potential users who don't understand the system.

to guess what their users are thinking, and to make predictions about the future.

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.

You can't collapse these categorizations
without some signal loss.

because the cataloguers
assume their classification should have force on the world, they
underestimate the difficulty of understanding what users are thinking,

Cities are real. They are real, physical facts. Countries are social fictions. It is much easier for a country to disappear than for a city to disappear, so when you're saying that the small thing is contained by the large thing, you're actually mixing radically different kinds of entities.

actually turned out to be an unstable category

the URL gives us a way to create a globally unique ID for anything we need to point to

to create a globally unique identifier for anything.

anyone can label those pointers, can tag those URLs, in ways that make them more valuable, and all without requiring top-down organization schemes.

Tags have the additional effect of grouping related URLs together.

There is no fixed set of categories or officially approved choices. You can use words, acronyms, numbers, whatever makes sense to you, without regard for anyone else's needs, interests, or requirements.

selected to help the user in later retrieval of those URLs.

The addition of a few simple labels hardly seems so momentous, but the surprise here, as so often with the Web, is the surprise of simplicity. Tags are important mainly for what they leave out.

By forgoing formal classification, tags enable a huge amount of user-produced organizational value, at vanishingly small cost.

with individual motivation, but group value.

way to make it valuable to individuals to tag their stuff, you'll generate a lot more data about any given object than if you pay a professional to tag it once and only once

ndividual differences don't have to be homogenized

Market logic allows many distinct points of view to co-exist, because it allows individuals to preserve their point of view, even in the face of general disagreement.

compressing things into a restricted number of categories.

the aggregate signal loss falls with scale in tagging systems, while it grows with scale in systems with single points of view.

But in a world where enough points of view are likely to provide some commonality,

"Is everyone tagging any given link 'correctly'", but rather "Is anyone tagging it the way I do?" As long as at least one other person tags something they way you would, you'll find it

The Web has an editor, it's everybody.

Merges create partial overlap between tags, rather than defining tags as synonyms. I

We move from a binary choice between saying two tags are the same or different to the Venn diagram option of "kind of is/somewhat
is/sort of is/overlaps to this degree". That is a really profound change.

Experts don't catalog this way; experts who learn
how to catalogue produce much more consistent labeling. Here, it's
whatever the user thought would help them remember the link later.

"This is context-dependent and temporary." Well, so was the category "East Germany."

It was 5 years between the spread of the link and Google's figuring out how to use whole collections of links to create additional value.

We're moving away from that sort of absolute declaration, and towards being able to roll up this kind of value by observing how people handle it in practice.

Does the world make sense or do we make sense of the world?

e, but you do it without an ontological goal. You do it without a goal of explicitly getting to or even closely matching some theoretically perfect view of the world.

emantics here are in the users, not in the system. T

It's up to the user to decide whether or not that recommendation is useful

The tag overlap is in the system, but the tag semantics are in the users.

shared (or complementary) interests would help to nurture the
communities of practice within the enterprise and potentially allow searching
and finding experts on specific topics to help solve business problems.

here is
also a strong cultural norm within the organization to use more formal names
within corporate applications.

valid reasons to limit access to some sets of bookmarks.

private bookmarks.

implementation includes
both private and enterprise (public) bookmarks.

alerted to relevant new information

To encourage ongoing use of a social bookmarking application, users need to
be