July 02, 2005
the Death of Hierarchical Folders
Google's War on Hierarchy, and the Death of Hierarchical Folders
by John Hiler
Hierarchical Folders have dominated info organization since they first appeared over 40 years ago. But in industry after industry, a strange thing is happening: hierarchy is under severe attack, and even dying out.Just take a look at some of the most successful info-based businesses of all time:
* Yahoo's Web Directory
* Microsoft Outlook's email folders
* Microsoft Window's file systemAll three businesses have achieved enormous success using hierarchical nested folders. And yet, one of these businesses has already abandoned Hierarchies, and the other two Hierarchies are under attack.
The company behind all three of these attacks? Google, the web's leading search engine.
Posted by jonphipps at 10:21 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
What is TagCloud?
TagCloud is an automated Folksonomy tool. Essentially, TagCloud searches any number of RSS feeds you specify, extracts keywords from the content and lists them according to prevalence within the RSS feeds. Clicking on the tag’s link will display a list of all the article abstracts associated with that keyword.The technology behind TagCloud.com was created just for fun by IonZoft
developer John Herren, and word quickly spread through the blogosphere.
After numerous requests for his source code, we decided to produce this
service based on John's original idea.
Posted by jonphipps at 10:17 AM | Comments (0)