It is tempting to depict Clay Shirkey's defense of tagging as setting up a false dilemma between tagging and classification, but I think his view is more that tagging forms one part of a wider picture. "Full text indexing, link analysis, trust networks, and related techniques now accomplish about 80% of what classification used to do for us." That's an image I can live with more easily than the caricature view that 'tagging will by itself replace classification'. In my view, the importance of tagging isn't large, because it has expressive limits, but that in combination with these other approaches - and especially link and text analyisis - it can play a role. And they key point - that classification has moved from the domain of experts to the domain of users - is, I think, unassailable.
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