RodeWorks

Tagging, or creating categories, or the taxonomy/folksonomy idea. Basically people creating and sharing their own indexing and categorizing of websites, images, and blog postings. This article provides a helpful overview of the subject:
alexandrasamuel.com » Today in the Toronto Star: Tagging

I just finished Simon Winchester’s book on the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary — a surprisingly interesting story and one I recommend — so the idea of taxonomy is fresh in my brain. I’ve expressed here before my own struggles with determining what categories my various posts fit under — I simply don’t feel up to the task. I’d really like a list of standard categories to choose from, or even better a program that scans my writing and suggests appropriate tags. I could add to them, change, ignore, etc, but at least I’d have some place to start.

I am now reading James Carse’s collection of essays Breakfast at the Victory: The Mysticism of Ordinary Experience. In his essay entitled A Philosopher Needs a Cat he quotes Lao Tsu and offers his own thoughts:

"Before there were the heavens and the earth, there was the unnameable. Naming was the mother of the ten thousand things." There are no things until there are words to name them. The names do not, therefore, come from the things but from the silence that precedes the act of naming.

The basic idea is that everything is part of a great continuum, and the process of naming them leads us to see them disconnected from their true nature. So perhaps my problems with categorizing my posts is related more to my connection to Zen Buddhism, than my fragmented and confused approach to writing. At least that’s how I’ll tag it for now…