Doug
-
07:31:39 pm on December 29, 2003 | # |
I’m still not entirely sure what Dave Winer is trying to do at Scripting News with the changes he’s made over the past couple of days. It’s interesting, though, to see an increasing number of blogs taking stabs at some of the same things I’m trying to do here at DSD. In particular, Dave points to Muxway and Delicious, both novel and interesting developments.
I’m also interested that Dave is so fascinated with hierarchy. If he’s really shooting to create a directory of the web, I suppose hierarchal classification is an obvious, and for most people preferred means of doing that.
However, based on much of what I’ve read of his writings, and his work on outliners, it’s pretty clear to me that he has a bias toward categorizing things in hierarchies. That’s not a bad thing, but I’m interested in how that (speculated) bias impacts his thinking and makes it different than mine. More and more, I find myself ambivalent or down right opposed to categorizing things into hierarchies; the nodes and links approach of true hypertext seems to match my style of thinking more comfortably.
Not that I think that the two things need be mutually exclusive; it’s obviously possible to create a hierarchal classification system and still have the items in the hierarchy or outline also act as hypertext links and nodes. Yahoo does this, Tinderbox in Outline mode works this way, and it looks like this is more or less the direction Dave is heading as well. Still, I always end up feeling stifled and constrained by the hierarchy - Dave himself alludes to this when discussing the issue of getting people to agree on taxonomy.
Classification is difficult, and often subjective. Moreover, I’m finding it’s also relative. Today, when I first seek to classify something, I may feel it belongs in category X, because I’m thinking about it in relationship to other items in category X. However, next Tuesday, it occurs to me that it also has a relationship with things in category Y, which I happen to be thinking about then. That relationship may be more or less subtle to the relationship with category X items, and, in fact, my perception of the strength of that relationship may vary depending on my interest level in and understanding of category X or Y. Of course, two hours or two days or two months later I’m thinking about category Z, and I discover a relationship between the original item and that category as well…and now category Z may seem to me to be the most relevant category to classify the item under.
Of course, one can just keep adding classification categories to an item as they come up, but at some point it seems to me that becomes counter-productive. Items, ideas, and thoughts (at least in my case) end up classified under a myriad of categories to the point where one needs meta-categories to handle classification of all the categories now we’re creating a hierarchal outline…), and then meta-meta-categories ad infinitum. Worse, the darn thing’s always a work in process, since I’m probably going to continually tweak the taxonomy as I redefine my perception of how any particular document, idea, or item relates to any particular category or level in the hierarchy. In the end, this sort of system is just too damn inflexible and unwieldy for me.
Worse, if someone else creates the taxonomy, it’s almost guaranteed that it isn’t going to make sense to me. I’m not going to necessarily see the logic of classifying item A in category X, sub-category X.1, sub-sub-category X.1.2. I have to first understand the taxonomy (how well I remember my botany, zoology, and dendrology classes!), learn to navigate it, and then make judgments on how well I feel the taxonomy agrees with my perception of how things are organized and relate to each other. Hence, I’ve never been able to stand Yahoo! or DMOZ or any other web directory. To me, they seem arbitrary and confining at the same time.
Finally, at the end of the day, what tends to interest me most are the relationships…and relationships are often the most relative thing in the world, at least when one is talking about people or ideas. Relationships between people and ideas change and evolve constantly, and so any system that seeks to reflect those relationships has to change and evolve constantly as well. That makes maintaining taxonomy and hierarchy, particularly shared taxonomy and hierarchy a very, very high-cost task, if not down right impossible.
So, I’m very interested to see how Dave and others are going to try and tackle this distributed directory idea. It seems to me to be a daunting task, and I freely admit that I don’t understand enough about the organizing principles behind something like this to make any real contributions or offer constructive ideas. I’ll be interested to read what others more educated than I have to say on this subject.
