Making Digital Durable: What Time Does to Categories Clay Shirky, Nov 02005, Seminar About Long Term Thinking “THIS is what the Internet has been straining to become,” said Clay Shirky Monday night, both joking and meaning it. He was referring to a category (“tag”) which emerged from users on the photo-sharing site Flickr. The category is “cats in sinks.” Growing use of the unlikely seeming tag exposed something that a lot of cats do and a lot of people feel compelled to photograph… Shirky pointed out that “cats in sinks” has none of the limitations of former category systems such as the Dewey Decimal System or the Library of Congress scheme or Yahoo’s hierarchical category structure. There is no need for a category “cats” with subcategory “in sinks,” nor a category “sinks” with subcategory “cats in”. You can see more about The Long Now Foundation and Seminars About Long Term Thinking at: http://www.longnow.org – slides, discussions, audio, and video available. Creative Commons license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5