Categorising information on the way out?

Donald Clark strikes a cord in Are we outsourcing memory?

"I've been blogging for years only to find that my posts form a sort of archive of thoughts that I often turn to for answers to questions I’m asked or reports I write or for items in talks I give at conferences."

It is easy to think of Donald's:

"What's remarkable about all of this outsourced memory is that it's free. The tools, storage and retrieval are all free. It's hard to see how astonishing this change has been, how absolutely revolutionary."

as stating the obvious; but plenty of people (and policies) fail to recognise how far "plain old web search", alongside the use of alerting mechanisms like RSS or Google Alerts, and a bit  (lot?) of tacit nous is increasingly how, in the developed world at least, knowledge is mediated for users, rather than visits to portals or repositories or gateways or other places where dedicated and committed professionals have spent time systematically organising, tagging, and cataloging material. (I know I've not got this quite right yet, but what is now happening feels to be that rather than the publisher, host, or owner of material needing to "categorise information on the way in", the user can "categorise it on the way out", with shape given to information by the user's choice of search terms, by the judgment he or she then exercises, and by the algorithms that rank-order what the user finds.)

Comments

[George]

For all the effort in developing restricted vocabularies for metadata schemas, that approach to information management is on the way out. It may remain useful, say, for a publisher to control the way users interact with a stable of related websites and their commercial sponsors, but as a way of discovering new knowledge (i.e. learning) it is a backwater with a lot of problems.