Clay Shirky has written an excellent review of formal categorization versus user categorization. It is based on two talks he gave, one about ontologies and the other on folksonomies and tags. He identifies many failings in the traditional classification schemes and especially takes Yahoo to task for its categorization. Classification systems tend to be biased, he argues, and be rigid. User tagging, on the other hand, is more democratic and self-regulating. The article is something of a polemic in defense of user tagging. We may not agree with all the points but it makes us appreciate the weaknesses of classification schemes and some of the potential of user tagging.
As it happens, I found this article by searching for taxonomy at Keotag, the new all-in-one meta search for locating tagged items, and selecting Blinklist as the target source. There is something to be said for this style of serach.
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