How we put our collective talents to work is a social issue, not solely a personal one.
Clay ShirkyRead
What I think is coming instead are much more organic ways of organizing information than our current categorization schemes allow, based on two units - the link, which can point to anything, and the tag, which is a way of attaching labels to links. The strategy of tagging - free-form labeling, without regard to categorical constraints - seems like a recipe for disaster, but as the Web has shown us, you can extract a surprising amount of value from big messy data sets.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote discusses the evolution of information organization through organic methods like tagging, emphasizing the value found in messy data sets.
In this quote, Clay Shirky reflects on the future of organizing information, moving away from rigid categorization to a more fluid and organic method centered around links and tags. He suggests that while free-form tagging may seem chaotic and prone to failure, it has the potential to uncover valuable insights from complex data, as demonstrated by the workings of the Web, which thrives on the richness and unpredictability of user-generated content.
Themes
InformationOrganizationTaggingDataWeb
In practice
Example use cases
In a tech conference discussing the future of data management.
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Wikipedia took the idea of peer review and applied it to volunteers on a global scale, becoming the most important English reference work in less than 10 years. Yet the cumulative time devoted to creating Wikipedia, something like 100 million hours of human thought, is expended by Americans every weekend, just watching ads.
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If someone around you is multitasking, you pick up distraction like second-hand smoke.
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