Organic Categories, Unique IDs

If you were at all interested in my recent ramblings about del.icio.us, you'll enjoy Clay Shirky's talk from ETech, Ontologies are Overrated, available now at IT Conversations. Clay discusses the online move away from "crisp" categorization systems to organic ones, made possible by unique identifiers like URLs.

On the subject of unique identifiers and del.icio.us, Aldo Castañeda also pinged me about XDI.org, with the thought that, as a "new layer of infrastructure [that] enables individuals and organizations to establish persistent Internet identities and form long-term, trusted peer-to-peer data sharing relationships," XDI might address the confusion issues I was speculating about in my podcast. Says Aldo, "XDI globally unique IDs, which can be assigned to tangible things like logos (embedded with origination info) have many interesting implications for trademark law." Agreed. Definitely something to watch. Also something to watch: Aldo's collaborative history of digital identity.