Books.

[dsrtao]

_Everything is Miscellaneous_, David Weinberger.

This is a non-fiction book with a Theme; nay, a Declaration, and it tells you that theme in the title and repeats it almost as often as the title of This is the title of this story, which is also found several times in the story itself. appears in that illustrious work.

Now I will explain the book to you so that you don't have to read it: when a collection of things reaches a large enough size, which is probably somewhere in the hundreds to thousands range, it becomes less useful to have those items arranged in a single hierarchy and more useful to tag each item with searchable attributes, which will then allow a user to search for the Right Thing or Things in a manner which is useful to them.

Corollary: having users add tags themselves can be a big win.

Weinberger makes this point many times, with various amusing and entertaining anecdotes to illiustrate it. Then he makes the point again...

Comments

[jducoeur]

On the one hand, this should be obvious. OTOH, a remarkable number of otherwise smart people still don't get it. Hierarchy is *deeply* ingrained in the way many people think, and they don't get the notion of *replacing* hierarchy with tags -- even if you can get them to grant that tags have value, they still think of it as a minor adjunct to hierarchy. Really: I have this argument not only with management, but sometimes with our better engineers.

So it may well bear repeating...