re: [gutvol-d] Catalog Subjects

bruce said:

support search by subject.

subject-based systems have utility, there's no doubt about it, especially ones that drop the physicalistic notion that items can only be placed in one place. and as i said, it's orders-of-magnitude easier to leverage an existing system than inventing one. but if you _are_ going to invent _any_ kind of system, it should be a collaborative-filtering one, not any type of category-based one, no matter how flexible it might be. tomorrow's people won't just want to "find" a book, they will want to be pointed at the exact book they'd most like to read... any system that isn't able to account for their individual preferences will eventually end up being ignored by them, and thus wasted effort... -bowerbird