Agylen

Following up on yesterday’s post on taxonomies vs. folksonomies, I spotted an interesting conversation going on between John Hiler, Dan Brown and Gene Smith.

Herewith some interesting quotes:

Google’s War on Hierarchy, and the Death of Hierarchical Folders, John Hiler: “But Folders rarely solve the core problem that they address - and often create new ones, like forcing you to create new folders just to manage new information. Solutions like Search, Archives, Stars and Labels get more directly at the core problem… and promise that the future of information management will look very different from its past.”

A world without folders is not a world without structure, Dan Brown: “Hierarchies are not dead. We may use them as we did when personal computers first came out, to organize a small amount of information. By limiting the scope of information, a user-defined hierarchy becomes useful. We may use them as temporary containers, like a collection of search results. We may use them to organize the elements of an information system (like email). We may find new ways to add meta data to information to allow us to create as-needed hierarchies. The human mind loves part-whole organization, even if its abstract and complex. While interfaces may do away with simple implementations (like folders) we will never see them disappear completely.”

The Death of Hierarchy? Gene Smith: “Indeed, structure is useful. And instead of one structural option–the folder–we now have derived structure (like search engine indexes and the derived polyhierarchies in iTunes) and user-applied structure (tags, labels, links, playlists). This is not the death of hierarchy; it’s the augmentation of hierarchy.”

What I’m taking away from this discussion is a reinforcement of my decision of keeping some amount of hierarchy (albeit a very shallow one), augmented with search, tags and links.