Blog posts by topic
Richard MacManus, in extending his post on organizing blogs by topic rather than author, assembled a list of blogs that responded to the initial idea. I got roped in there, which is a weirdness in a way since I really didn't discuss the topic, but now I feel all guilty. So…
A listing of blog posts by topic could be useful. I've been fooling around with evector's k-collector for a couple of days now and I have to admit I've found a couple of really good articles that I'd probably never have seen via my semi-random explorations. The number of participants, like with any of the start-up blog services, looks pretty limited but it's a quality selection… of blogosphere-centric blogs. Being a blogger, this is useful to me and I'll likely keep looking in periodically.
There's still some conceptual stuff to be worked, though. Mr. MacManus says
Topics can and should be "exactly the size of one idea", whereas categories usually encompass a number of similar ideas. For example if I have a category called ".NET", then I may use it to file links to information about ASP.NET, my thoughts on how .NET can be used to build a Universal Canvas, how Microsoft is using .NET as the base for their next Operating System, etc. Many topics, but just one category.
Yet as I wandered evector's k-collector, I noticed many, if not most, posts were categorized under more than one topic. Frankly, I feel that is as it should be.
The "one post = one topic = one idea" thing sounds as reasonable as the instructions on how to write an essay I got in elementary school: tell them what you're about to tell them, tell them, then tell them what you told them. And I still tell folks this is the way to learn how to write (I am not a professional instructor, I just like helping folks). But I don't always write that way myself. Really good, really informative writing can draw of diverse conceptual roots, and the "topic" can be "these multiple things correlate in this fashion," but it might not be. For instance, is this post about blogs by topic or writing? A case could be made for either or both.
Good writing just kind of
flows. I wouldn't want folks to feel constrained by the need/desire to fit into a specific framework, and that would happen as inevitably as ranking concerns flow from systems like the TTLB Ecosystem, Blogdex and the like.
Beyond this base concern, categorizing my posts by all applicable topics would be too damn much work, and I'm not expecting sufficient AI to do that automatically to be at my disposal for a considerable period of time.
posted by Prometheus 6 at 7/6/2003 08:03:25 AM |
Posted by P6 at July 6, 2003 08:03 AM
| Trackback URL: http://www.prometheus6.org/mt/mt-tb.cgi/1129
