Intent: to be able to search blogspace (ultimately all digitally stored and publicly accessible literature) and find people who are (or have done) writing about similar topics.

Intent: to be able to search my own blogspace and have the same result.

Belief: That self-classification (ala liveTopics) off-the-cuff doesn't work that well when I'm trying to find my own entries, and worse when trying to search the (expanding) universe of digitally stored writing. Thus I want a system of classification for my writings and for others-- a system that can be applied by the writer or by an automaton-- or a combination.

Complexity: I'm looking for a very general and generally accepted system. For the sake of finding material (and storing and then finding later my own material) I would be content to use a general category system such as the Library of Congress, the Dewey Decimal system or the UDC. Yes-- use of the categories will force me to extract myself from the moment, place and context. However, I don't know that such an extraction is a bad thing. It may even be a necessary part of broadly connecting.. possibliy necessary even for having easy access to my own entries.

I have to translate into a general category system in order to communicate with others... I have to remember terms and processes that are effective in the shared spaces of my family, organization, culture.

Also, there is benefit re accessing products of past introspective processes; if I need an idea of my own three months later I will be working from a different moment, place and context. When writingI have to step aside from those immersed particulars to store my thoughts for future access. When seeking to review for the purpose of extension-- I could go to the same category system (breaking out of the moment and my own unique , possibly preverbal categories) and use the same category system for a search.

A general category system -- not strictly useful in the moment-- may be my best resource for saving and accessing my own ideas which I recorded at different moments of my existence. There is some information loss, perhaps, in the translation, but this loss is , I suspect, tiny in comparison to the gain of information found through use of the general system.

Benefit to interpersonal communications: If I extend this reasoning to accessing related ideas from digitally recorded thoughts of many others, alive and dead, I will have to use a sieve that works for different individuals, peoples, cultures, times. A general category system, again, would be useful. It doesn't have to be fancy or stubborn, just consistent. And, if I want my thoughts to be found by those who are so situated as to want something that relates to their situation, if, in short I want to communicate with those that are interested, I think my best chance , as an idea broadcaster, of reaching an interested audience is to use a general category system.

My Universal Category Robot entry was meant to signal my belief in the pay-offs that would come from using a broadly based category system; I was also signalling my hope that there might be a java applet out there, somewhere, which would help broadcasters and searchers alike to use categorization as a means to enhance the likelihood of connection. (Dr 2: Title change only 6/2/03)