Custard Melt

The Clay Shirky article is interesting because it goes to what has become the heart of the project. Ideas about tagging and classification. Shirky argues that rigid categorisations are difficult to impose and often lose their value in the face of a changing world, besides which they're fundamentally rooted in the idea of arranging physical books on physical shelves.

On the internet, he says, there is no shelf. To prove it he's got a nice series of diagrams... (go and look, then come back)

The one we're most interested in is that last one. Which I'll reproduce here to make life easier.

[Just links (There is no filesystem)]

Here the rigid hierarchical structure of the earlier system has been replaced with a structure composed entirely of links between different pieces of information. The links form an unlimited number of possible shelves and filing systems, and by allowing anyone who wants to make connections between disparate bits of data the system grows and structures itself.

This is why services like del.ico.us and Flikr work, and hopefully it's why Custard will work. Within custard there are three ways to link pieces of information.

1. Tagging allows for one to many relationships. A tag can be shared by any number of pieces of content. 'Power' might be associated with pictures of a power plant, and the President of the USA. When tags become used in combination more clarity emerges 'Coal Power' shows the power plant but not the president, what 'Oil Power' shows is a different matter, and without making a value judgement about the content which we expect our users to share, who are we to tell whoever made the connection that they are wrong?

2. Linking allows for one to one relationships. It's a way to express connections between pieces of information that go beyond a shared subject. For instance you might link an event, to a map (showing where it is), a discussion group (who organised it) and a press report (describing what happened). These items will each have a place of their own among the multiple shelves of the tagging system, but once a visitor has found a way to one, accessing the others should be simple.

3. Geo Location where a thing is, or where a thing is about is a good way to connect things. Pollution near powerplants is one example, activists near other activists is another. Custard will make it easy to make these connections between different pieces of content, providing another dimension for our increasingly flexible shelving system.

At the end of the current iteration (Thursday, due to some folks being ill / on holiday / whatever) we'll be able to show the world a custard where linking, tagging and geo-location are all running together. We expect that this will lead to some changes about the way we see the system and interact with it. With luck it will bring to mind some new possibilities, and hopefully show the rest of the world what it is we've been working on for all this time.