I meant to mention this on the last show, but if you’re at all interested in folksonomies, you need to take a listen to Clay Shirky’s presentation entitled “Ontology is Overrated: Links, Tags, and Post-hoc Metadata.”

Two quick teasers from the summary: “Ontology, far from being an ideal high-order tool, is a 300-year-old hack, now nearing the end of its useful life. The problem ontology solves is not how to organize ideas but how to organize things — the Library of Congress’s classification scheme exists not because concepts require consistent hierarchical placement, but because books do.”

“As we have learned from the Web, when data is decoupled from physical presence, it is fluid enough to be grouped differently by different readers, and on different days. The Web’s main virtue, in handling data, is to transmute organization from an a priori, content-based judgment to one that can be ad hoc, context-based, socially embedded, and constantly altered. The Web frees us from needing to argue about whether The Book of 5 Rings “is” a business book or a primer on war — it is plainly both, and not only are we freed from making that judgment firmly or in advance, we are freed from needing to make it explicit at all.”

This is hot stuff, folks. Guaranteed to greatly inspire some, while boiling the blood of many others.

Update: If you want a little taste of Clay Shirky on folksonomies, listen to the April 7 edition of Future Tense. I still strongly recommend the longer presentation.