Shirky nailing the problem with formally and up-front defined classification systems:
This last point is key — the number one fucked up thing about ontology (don't get me started, the suckiness of ontology is going to be my ETech talk this year…), but, as I say, the number one thing, out of a rich list of such things, is the need to declare today what contains what as a prediction about the future. Let's say I have a bunch of books on art and creativity, and no other books on creativity. Books about creativity are, for the moment, a subset of art books, which are a subset of all books.
Then I get a book about creativity in engineering. Ruh roh. I either break my ontology, or I have to separate the books on creativity, because when I did the earlier nesting, I didn't know there would be books on creativity in engineering. A system that requires you to predict the future up front is guaranteed to get worse over time.
Which is spot on for some current conversations I'm having, where there is a requirement/need/desire/compulsion to try and define the structure now and then spend the rest of eternity trying to manipulate the content to fit into the predefined structure, leading to an inevitable loss of accuracy in filing and classification.
The new del.icio.us experimental posting bookmarklet which shows you your current set of tags and also recommended tags [based on other people who've tagged the same content] seems like a nice solution to one of the problems of informal tagging - ie no one uses the same tags. Seeing what other people are doing allows tag reuse, but doesn't prevent you from also using a set of tags that might be more personally meaningful at the same time.
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