Interesting examples, terrible argument! No substantiated claims whatsoever! Shirky obviously thinks he is pretty smart and does not have to produce any real arguments based on evidence.
This piece is based on two talks I gave in the spring of 2005 -- one at the O'Reilly ETech conference in March, entitled "Ontology Is Overrated", and one at the IMCExpo in April entitled "Folksonomies & Tags: The rise of user-developed classification." Th
Ontologies are enabling technology for the Semantic Web. They are a means for people to state what they mean by formal terms used in data that they might generate or consume. Folksonomies are an emergent phenomenon of the social web. They are created a
A. Plangprasopchok, K. Lerman, and L. Getoor. Proceedings of the 16th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, page 949--958. New York, NY, USA, ACM, (2010)
P. Mika. The Semantic Web - ISWC 2005, Proceedings of the 4th International Semantic Web Conference, ISWC 2005, Galway, Ireland, November 6-10, volume 3729 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, page 522-536. Springer, (2005)
F. Limpens, F. Gandon, and M. Buffa. Automated Software Engineering - Workshops, 2008. ASE Workshops 2008. 23rd IEEE/ACM International Conference on, (September 2008)
N. Tomuro, and A. Shepitsen. Proceedings of the 2009 Workshop on The People's Web Meets NLP: Collaboratively Constructed Semantic Resources, page 42--50. Stroudsburg, PA, USA, Association for Computational Linguistics, (2009)