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November 22, 2003
Some Ideas Die
Kudos to Clay Shirky for Otlet: Some ideas die because they are wrong.
[Yahoo] was, in other words, "an intellectual cosmos illuminated both by objective classification and by the direct influence of readers and writers." And it sucked. Sucked sucked sucked. We didn’t even know how bad it sucked until Google came along and (its hard to remember this even five years later) saved the Web from drowning in its own waste.
I won't dive into the Otlet debate 1, 2 (not that it's that heated).
However, as someone who in the past longed for a way to heirarchically categorize all of my information, I have gradually moved away from that mode of thinking toward the value of search.
In fact, my current strategy for personal knowledge management, both at home and work, revolves around recording the non-heirarchical flow of ideas into a wiki. My wiki-of-choice is the Python-based MoinMoin, because it's quick to set up, easy to customize, and has good management tools. While I maintain some notion of heirachy when recording ideas into my personal wiki, I find that the best way to access them is through the search.
The problem with ontologies or taxonomies is that they are damn hard for the average person to build and maintain effectively, especially if you want it to be used by someone else, and even more so when it has to interface or mesh with other taxonomies created by other people. Which is why I think Dave Winer's attempt at organizing weblog entries by heirarchical categories, and the eventual goal of meshing multiple people's category directories together, pales in comparison to the usefulness of a tool like searching a Wiki or searching a weblog for your own information or searching Google or Feedster for multiple information sources.
Posted November 22, 2003 10:24 AM