Clay strikes back

Clay Shirky has a response to my market populism post over at Tagsonomy. This sums up his thesis:

[Gene] is instead trying to carve out a more reasonable position, arguing for the usefulness of tags in some limited number of cases, and peaceful coexistence with other sorts of classification schemes.

I, on the other hand, am of the unreasonable view that classification schemes are going to be largely displaced by tagging for the same reasons that search has largely displaced directories for finding things, namely that distributed intelligence, for all its faults, tends to beat the work of a professional class when dealing with large, dynamic systems.

I've only had a chance to skim it, but it looks like a thorough and thoughtful response (as expected). I'm just back from vacation, so I hope to read through it in detail this week.

And just when I thought the whole tagging thing was getting boring...