(no subject)

[electricland]

My boss just sent me this article. It won't be news, or applicable, to most of you, but I'm finding it interesting.

One of the biggest problems with categorizing things in advance is that it forces the categorizers to take on two jobs that have historically been quite hard: mind reading, and fortune telling.

Also, there's a shout-out to LiveJournal, which is always good.

Comments

[blue71canoe.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the link. I was sucked in for about 10 minutes before I remembered that I'm supposed to be doing something else.

[swestrup]

Clay Shirky is well worth reading. This article I have some complaints about, but they are minor. Mainly I think his praise of the LJ interests is misplaced. Yes it could have been done worse. Just look at Orkut for an example. That doesn't mean it couldn't be done a heck of a lot better either.

LJ needs to have a way of letting users create interest groups, much as Clay describes the use of tags later in his article.

I've been wanting to write a program to do that for some time now, but I have so many projects I don't know if I ever will.

[electricland.livejournal.com]

Interest groups? How do you mean? I'm intrigued. Something like "Many people who selected X as an interest are also interested in Y"?

[electricland.livejournal.com]

hee! that happens to me ALL THE TIME.

[swestrup]

More like "You selected both 'SF' and 'Sci Fi' as interests. Many people consider these to be types of 'Science Fiction'. Do you Agree?"

The idea would be to have a fluid set of categories and a fuzzy set of which interests were generally believed to fall into which categories.

I worked out the details with _sps_ a year or so ago, but I must admit its all kind of hazy in my head now. I would have to dig up my notes to figure it out further.

[electricland.livejournal.com]

Doesn't that get you right back into the need for a human cataloguer/taxonomist, though? Where does the information about the superordinate category come from?

[swestrup]

The same place the list of interests comes from. Folks are free to make them up, or not, and can decide to use them, or not.

[electricland.livejournal.com]

Aaah, I get you now. Yeah, that could be interesting.