Ontology is Overated... Clay Shirky Article

The following is from Clay Shirky's article:
"Look what's happened here. Yahoo, faced with the possibility that they could organize things with no physical constraints, added the shelf back. They couldn't imagine organization without the constraints of the shelf, so they added it back. It is perfectly possible for any number of links to be in any number of places in a hierarchy, or in many hierarchies, or in no hierarchy at all. But Yahoo decided to privilege one way of organizing links over all others, because they wanted to make assertions about what is "real."

Reading this section of the article on shirky.com I just had to laugh out loud. This is exactly why I have a hard time with tagging things online- I LIKE HIERARCHY! Hierarchies make things easier to find, they make sense, and are whoa- shocker- similar to the Library of Congress classification system getting smaller and smaller, more and more detailed as you go. Simply put, I like what Yahoo is doing with the hierarchy bit, but I don't actually use it all that often. My own searching behavior involves primarily natural language on the simple little Google search box. There goes that argument....

(library of congress)

And then I read on,
"One reason Google was adopted so quickly when it came along is that Google understood there is no shelf, and that there is no file system. Google can decide what goes with what after hearing from the user, rather than trying to predict in advance what it is you need to know."
Exactly, that is why these Google folks are so darn smart! Then again, never in a million years would I be able to figure out how exactly the Google search algorithm works... and there is obviously an advantage for not categorizing everything the way Yahoo does.

Anyway, I appreciate ontology as any good librarian should and struggle with the randomness of the web. In contrast, catalogers and the general public have very different ideas of what makes a good subject heading. Catalogers are not mind readers, what they consider as good controlled vocabulary is often not what others think of when trying to describe a book.