It’s a challenge to categorise tools by benefits and end products when people end up using technologies in ways that the creators hadn’t thought up yet, isn’t it?

My major concern is that people don’t damn a whole range of options because they’ve tried one and it didn’t work. For instance, I’m opposed to violent and misogynistic role playing games — but that doesn’t mean I am against ALL role playing games.

My favourite way of finding tools and sites of interest to me is to start with my networks, then move out to sites like del.icio.us and edna to find resources that real people have looked at. I rarely if ever go to directories - unless they are forums that I’ve discovered in previous searches and find to be of value.

It’s the need for prior knowledge to make sense of taxonomies and controlled vocabularies that can make it frustrating for those new to a community to find what they need. What’s the answer? Do we just shrug our shoulders and exclude those not in the know — or can and should there be ways to give them a rosetta stone?

Cheers

KerryJ

But what if we were librarians, trying to categorize the “content(s)” produced by the tools? I suppose we could call them a “taxonomy of folksomonies” (like Nick does) if we were trying to classify a community, its preferred tools and the contents produced by them.

So does that mean we should be using domains as a place to aggregate a range of tools for a particular community, a la sitepoint.com. Or should we be classifying the domains, like books in a library, so we can find the contents and we want, and then tools which produced them?

I’m stuck in the middle. http://orweblog.oclc.org/archives/001700.html