Tuesday, May 21, 2002

Eric Alterman starts a weblog on MSNBC.   Not that long ago his colleague Marty Wolk did an article about weblogs (in which I was mentioned).  [Story via Scripting News] 3:28:34 PM

Blog Notes 4: Categories No Audience is Interested in Everything You Produce.  XML gives Weblogs the capacity to be organized into categories. It's good news and bad. When authoring an article (or one of those littler bloglets), the author is confonted immediately with a series of usability questions like: If I put this piece in several categories, does that reduce the meaning of each category? If the piece is on the home page and in a category, why would anyone ever go to both? If the piece is only in a category and not on the home page, how does anyone know? If the piece is only on the home page, what are categories for? In other words, the use of xml/categories forces every Weblog Author or Editor (perhaps the word is Author) to consider the audience from a structural perspective each time a piece is developed, particularly in the early weeks of the development of the blog's basic style. Categories are extremely useful for knowledge-management applications. They give an 'Author' the ability to tell a specific group of readers that all of X sort of material will appear in x section thus allowing the development of discrete conversations about subsets of the overall architecture. XML creates the opportunity to keep that question open for a while as the blogger develops a real time feel for audience structure and composition. via [5th Constituency] 1:45:44 PM

© Copyright 2002 Ernest Svenson.