Jay McCarthy (over at makeOutCity)
Wednesday, November 19th, 2003responds to an earlier post about categorization, taxonomy and directories on the web. “What I like about Dave Winer’s idea is that it puts a directory at the hands of every person on the web. It doesn’t suppose that we will create the One True Categorization, and thus is less likely to succumb to the self-importance of ignoring the unclassifiable and inability to express relationships. Our directories relationships to each other wi[ll] help relate the rest of the web by proxy.” Well stated. I’d call such an individualized directory a commonplace book: “A personal journal in which quotable passages, literary excerpts, and comments are written.” Read comments as MARC records and you get a layman’s view of cataloging. Now what does a catalog of commonplace books look like?
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