Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future

libraries have acquisitions departments and card catalogs, magazines have editors and tables of contents, and so on. In the early years of the web, numerous attempts were made to apply some of these approaches to the content generated by the crowd. Yahoo originally stood for “Yet Another Hierarchically Organized Oracle,” and it rose to prominence as a sort of card catalog for the net; a human-created and -maintained set of website categories and subcategories.†