A blog looking at business communication, knowledge management, scripting tools, OS technology news and other things of interest to mobile tech workers. As I find interesting news this will also contain pointers to thoughts related to configuration managment, change management and general software development.
Here is more on the "tagging good ... taxonomy bad" meme that is making its way around the internet. Here is what got my attention:
There are strong similarities to how wikis and tagging works. Tagging lowers transaction costs for contributions and fixing mistakes. This increases participation and the probability of the right data actually existing in the first place. It also enables a dedicated community to self-govern (and note that as in the case of Wikipedia, the enthusiasm hasn't worn off)
A single tag can be applied in error, and be fixed locally, but that matters less when viewed in the aggregate. Larger patterns arise that are statistically significant.
This is what I am trying to do with TWiki, namely fostering a tagging practice amoung the users instead of a rigid taxonomy. I have implemented a simple tagging system in the wiki with the goal of transfering the organization / categorization work to the whole group of users. The goal is to end up with a better and more useful organization system for the content of a single wiki ... and to have this emerge from The Wisdom of Crowds er ... wiki users.
Just spent 30 minutes cleaning up a huge litter of spam that hit a ton of old posts ... weird thing is that it seemed to cluster around mentions of the Wall Street Journal ... strange. Anyway, is there anything we can do so that PyCS isn't so vulnerable to this?
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