
Joshua Schachter

It's all dependent on human context. This is what we're starting to see with del.icio.us, with Flickr, with systems that are allowing for and aggregating tags. The signal benefit of these systems is that they don't recreate the structured, hierarchical categorization so often forced onto us by our physical systems. Instead, we're dealing with a sig... See more
Clay Shirky • Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags
FFFFOUND! was a social bookmarking web site that allowed registered users to share already existing images on the Internet and to receive personalized recommendations of other images. Users not registered could view these posts and the corresponding recommendations; registration was strictly by invitation. The site was established in 2007 by Yosuke... See more
Yosuke Abe • FFFFOUND!
So in any given website:
1% create all the content, 9% edit and organize, 90% make up the viewing audience.
Svpply was like this. Even as we grew to hundreds of thousands of viewers, it was always a small group of a few thousand members that fueled the engine.
Smallness
The list of factors making ontology a bad fit is, also, an almost perfect description of the Web -- largest corpus, most naive users, no global authority, and so on. The more you push in the direction of scale, spread, fluidity, flexibility, the harder it becomes to handle the expense of starting a cataloguing system and the hassle of maintaining i... See more