Tags is not folksonomies and Tags is not Flat name spaces

From a piece written by Clay Shirky on tags:

Ontology is a good way to organize objects, in other words, but it is a terrible way to organize ideas, and in the period between the invention of the printing press and the invention of the symlink, we were forced to optimize for the storage and retrieval of objects, not ideas. Now, though, we can scrap of the stupid hack of modeling our worldview on the dictates of shelf space. One day the concept of creativity can be a subset of a larger category, and the next day it can become a slice that cuts across several categories. In hierarchy land, this is a crisis; in tag land, it’s an operation so simple it hardly merits comment.

I discovered this while reading Simon Willison's weblog on tagging. This started from a DuckDuckGo search on tagging strategies for blogs as I aim to be more descriptive and liberal with how I do tags here. This would help myeslf finding things but also being able to share a collection of links (from here) or throughts (from my blog).

Clay Shirky talks about how tagging doesn't have to, and shouldn't, be hierarchical. Some of the earlier tags on my blog followed a hierachy, or example everything tagged rail was also tagged transport, such that rail was a subset of transport.

This somewhat also loosely relates to how the younger generation don't use folders to structure their data but rely mainly on search. Here's an excerpt from an essay written by Clay Shirky on the same topic:

A lot of the conversation that’s going on now about categorization starts at a second step — “Since categorization is a good way to organize the world, we should…” But the first step is to ask the critical question: Is categorization a good idea? We can see, from the Yahoo versus Google example, that there are a number of cases where you get significant value out of notcategorizing. Even Google adopted DMOZ, the open source version of the Yahoo directory, and later they downgraded its presence on the site, because almost no one was using it. When people were offered search and categorization side-by-side, fewer and fewer people were using categorization to find things.