Disordered Cogitations

I just listened to Clay Shirky's excellent E-Tech 2005 podcast entitled, "Ontology is Overrated." He cites a web site, del.icio.us, which allows people to create and share their own ontologies (collections of bookmarks).

The key philosophical debate is whether there is inherent structure in the world/web or if humans (users) impose order on a chaotic world/web. If one subscribes to the first notion, then the trick is to discover the correct ontology, define it and then start putting all the websites into the correct buckets (add the correct content tags). If one subscribest to the second notion, then one creates one's own ontology as one goes along. These ontologies can be aggregated over large numbers of people and then statistically analyzed to determine the probabililty distributions of ontological categories that apply to a piece of content (web page).

The second makes more sense to me.

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By the way, in googling for del.icio.us, I discovered delicious monster. It is designed to work with the new Mac OS X.4 (Tiger) features Spotlight and Dashboard. This Delicious Monster accepts an image of a

barcode on the back of any book, movie, music, or video game. Delicious Library does the rest. The barcode is scanned and within seconds the item's cover appears on your digital shelves filled with tons of in-depth information downloaded from one of six different web sources from around the world.

Way cool!