Clay Shirky on the subject of Categories, Links and Tags:
Critically, the semantics here are in the users, not in the system. This is not a way to get computers to understand things. When del.icio.us is recommending tags to me, the system is not saying, “I know that OSX is an operating system. Therefore, I can use predicate logic to come up with recommendations — users run software, software runs on operating systems, OSX is a type of operating system — and then say ‘Here Mr. User, you may like these links.’”
What it’s doing instead is a lot simpler: “A lot of users tagging things foobar are also tagging them frobnitz. I’ll tell the user foobar and frobnitz are related.” It’s up to the user to decide whether or not that recommendation is useful — del.icio.us has no idea what the tags mean. The tag overlap is in the system, but the tag semantics are in the users. This is not a way to inject linguistic meaning into the machine.
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