Another older posting (well earlier this month anyway) from Dave Pollard on Social Software. I have to say without being too cohernet, that I agree wholeheartedly. While I often see calls for taxonomies and classification, I can never see how one can agree on what goes where. I mean I have difficulty fitting my posts into my Categories, so how anyone else would guess that i have filed this under networking isn't obvious (other than its at the bottom of the post :) ):
What does this mean for the networking components, the 'connecting people-to-people' aspects of social software tools? It means that each of us needs to be able to represent our networks our way, and let the software draw the bridges, connect the dots between them. It means, just as there must be no standard taxonomy to which all our blogs must conform, there must be no standard, mandatory directory format for our networks. The Dewey decimal system of knowledge taxonomy sucked. The old hard-copy Bell phone book sucked (and still does). The last thing we need is to replace these old, inflexible, restrictive tyrannies with new ones.
Posted by Paul Goodison at August 22, 2003 11:00 PM | TrackBack