Clay's latest essay, The Semantic Web, Syllogism, and Worldview, has resulted in quite the flurry of interesting responses.
Mark Pilgrim has a number of these responses collected in his "B-Links" sidebar, but I'm going to put them here, as well, so that I can find them more easily in the future.
- Shelley Powers' Deconstructing the Syllogistic Shirky, A Semantic Conversation, and The Value of Human on a Humanless Web
- Paul Ford's A Response to Clay Shirky's "The Semantic Web, Syllogism, and Worldview
- Ken MacLeod's XML vs. RDF :: N ◊ M vs. N + M (Or, Questioning Why People Can Only See the Semantic Web AI Strawman)
- Dare Obasanjo's The Semantic Web and Perpetual Motion Machines
- Sam Ruby's Syllogism (particularly the comments thread) and Blind Spots
- Tom Hoffman's Shirky on SemWeb, a Case Study
- Tim Bray's Metadata, Semantics, and All That
- Alex Wright's Shirky on the Semantic Web
- Joe Gregorio's Shirky on the Semantic Web
- Danny Ayers' Shirky's Men of Straw
- Dan
Bricklin'sBrickley's comments on Danny Ayers' site, and post to the www-archive list - Steve Cayzer's Clay Shirky and the Syllogistic Web
- Carol O's The semantic web, metacrap and libraries (this one says a lot of what I was thinking...)
- Frank Paynter's Network of Networks
- David Weinberger's The Semantic Web and SGML and Are We Semantic Yet
- Jay Fienberg's Metadata and vagueness
- Marc Canter's Enough complaining - lets get on with doing
(I'll update this list as I find other interesting responses. Feel free to add relevant links in the comments, as well.)
My inner librarian has a response brewing, as well, but it will have to wait a bit. It's the last week of the quarter, and I've got exams and project to give and grade. Next week is blogging and reading catch-up time.
thanks for the handy list. one point of clarification; Dan Bricklin and myself are different people. He invented spreadsheets or somesuch when I was a toddler. Interestingly enough we're both doing Web metadata apps though (me: FOAF; him: SMBmeta) and both contributed to chapters in O'Reilly's Peer to Peer book a couple years back. Never met the guy, though I'd like to. The SMBmeta thing is very like FOAF in some ways (though more restricted aka scoped...).
cheers,
--danbri (Dan Brickley)
Sorry, Dan! I've corrected it.
I've actually been looking for librarian responses, but haven't found any. I posted my own off-the-cuff librarianish responses this morning. Apologies for the self-link: http://www.rawbrick.net/2003/11/10/07.15/
FWIW I wrote a longer reply to shirky copyied to the www-archive archive:
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-archive/2003Nov/0010.html
Paul Ford (ftrain) has a fascinating take: http://www.ftrain.com/ContraShirky.html -- i think I'm actually beginning to understand RDF...not that I'd know what to do with that understanding at this point.
Yes, please add Ford's ContraShirky.html to your list. I'd say it takes poor Clay out back to the woodshed in the nicest, most gentle way imaginable.
I wrote something too. Semantic Web Cibola
shirky's article is now at #5 on a google search for "semantic web". Our defense has made it more likely his voice will be heard and not ours.