March 22, 2006 Folksonomy and Worldview: How We Categorize and What We SeeFor centuries, we have relied on groups of professionals to organize the world for us. Librarians, census takers, psychiatrists, even web site designers are responsible for presenting us with models of the world. History is organized by geography. Racial declarations must come from an official list. Homosexuality used to be a disease; later, it stopped being one. We use these classifications every day, often without thinking about them.Remarkably, though, most of these classifications are no longer necessary, at least in their present form. Prior to the internet, classification had to be done by professionals, because there was no way to get the users to do the classifying on their own. Now there is. The explosion of interest in folksonomy and tagging — bottom-up ways to create user-generated classification systems — has provided an alternate set of solutions to the problem of classification, solutions that open up new ways of viewing the world.C L A Y S H I R K Y writes about Economics & Culture, Media & Community, Open Source. He teaches at New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program.Join his mailing list at http://shirky.com/nec.html or view past essays on http://shirky.com