February 01, 2005, 1:51 PM — Dr. David Weinberger is co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto and author of Small Pieces Loosely Joined. His most recent research has been on the changing nature of how information is organized for search and retrieval. It's the field of taxonomy and classification indexing and information tagging, and it's undergoing nothing short of a revolution.
Bruce Taylor spoke with Dr. Weinberger about the social, historical, and intellectual impact of how digital content is tagged. Following is an edited transcript of that conversation.
Bruce Taylor: Going back over your career over the last decade or so, you've had an enormous influence in the whole area of intelligent search and retrieval, indexing, taxonomies, tagging, meta tagging. It's a very, very arcane and incredibly important part of the world we're in today digitally. Where are you going with that now?
David Weinberger: For the past year I've been writing not a book, but a book proposal exactly on this topic. The book proposal is now 25,000 words long. So I may go straight from proposal to book. You never know. But the topic that really interests me these days is the way that we organize. We have well-developed ways of organizing and categorizing and thinking about stuff in the real world, very basic principles that have been with us for thousands of years. Now we have this digital way of organizing digital stuff, and the principles of organization are quite different.
They violate all sorts of the rules in the real world. In the real world you can only put a book on one spot on one shelf, whereas if you're doing this digitally, you'd put it into as many different categories as you could. That's a pretty basic rule that gets violated. And furthermore, the rules by which we organize, the principles by which we organize the real world and have done so for 2500 years are really basic and important. They determine things like what constitutes a discipline, what constitutes a topic; in some senses what constitutes meaning. And when you change that stuff digitally, it should have some effect. So that's what I've really been interested in.
In the past few months and with the pace picking up, there's been a huge amount of development in the realm of tagging online and digitally. The differences between the sort of real-world way of organizing stuff, which in its finest incarnation, you have somebody who builds a universal taxonomy, a set of classifications into which everything can fit, you know, like the Dewey Decimal System. Every book can find a place in this preset set of categories arranged into a hierarchical tree.
The absolute opposite of that is what's happening on the Web now as more and more sites allow people to tag content, whether it's bookmarks at del.icio.us or it's photos at flickr. So you post your photo and you put in a word or two that constitutes a tag. And those tags are then made public, so anybody can find all the photos that have been tagged as Grand Canyon or as humorous or whatever. So that's a bottom-up taxonomy, a bottom-up set of classifications. There's not a preset set.
It's useful, and it says something profound about the change in knowledge that we're seeing from being a top-down set of categories that preexist to us making stuff up, clustering according to interest. Not by some God-given one single plan, but we cluster fluidly and flexibly by interest. And the owner of the information no longer is the owner of the organization of that information. We're really taking that upon ourselves now individually, and most importantly, socially. That is a huge difference of what it constitutes to know something, to categorize it.
Taylor:It would seem to me that that would have very large implications. What are some of the high points?
Weinberger: Well, for one thing, I think it will have important implications on what constitutes expertise, what it means to be an expert. I mean, that stuff has already been changing rapidly, thanks to the Web. It will make institutions that insist on owning the organization of their information feel hidebound and traditional and difficult to work with.
