Shirky’s ontology speech

Clay Shirky has posted the full text of his Ontology is Overrated talk. I mentioned this before, but now that the full text is up (including the illustrations from the PowerPoint presentation), it’s worth a read. Here is an example he brings out from the old Dewey Decimal System, which I sure remember from my school libraries growing up.

The one sentence summary of the talk is the title of part two of his talk: “The Only Group That Can Categorize Everything Is Everybody.”