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January 30, 2007
Is there any living, breathing example of a taxonomic approach working?.Scaling to keep-up with the hyper-efficiency we see in peer-production systems? Anyone?
2.
(Aside, folksonomy, hierarchy, ia, information, lazyweb, social, tagging, taxonomy, web2.0)
Dewey Decimal? The taxonomy of living things (Phylum, Class, Order …)?
Jesse those both seem to be good examples of old style taxonomies: maintained by experts, slowly accreting, contended over as a limited resource. Having to send your photos or blog posts away to the Library of Congress to find out how they should be tagged sounds like a failure case
Alternately I suppose that you could argue that production of science and naming rather then being seen as an unwieldly domain of experts is actually an example of a self organizing community of passionate actors producing content in a distributed ad-hoc manner, sync’ed only by a handful of rules.
Neither one lend themselves to casual participation. (is that a feature or a bug I wonder?)