I observe that many who like me hand-craft their
publishing setup are kind of absessive about taxonomies, both their contents
and construction.
Consider examples chez Walsh
(taxonomy,
machinery),
Pilgrim
(taxonomy), and
Winer (taxonomy).
Of course there’s also that
link to your right labeled What (but these days,
I’m increasingly conscious that I need to run through the whole essay farm here
and do some taxonomicleanup).
So, a reasonable person might ask: “Why all this taxonomy work?
What is it being used for?”
And I wouldn’t have a good answer.
I’m not stopping, though.
Intuition is a perilous guide to engineering action, but for now, this
certainly feels like the Right Thing To Do.
Well, for one thing, categorization is tricky and can readily become a source of frustration. As Jens-Christian Fischer writes,
I have the constant feeling, that whatever I put in as a keyword or a category is ultimately wrong.
Wrong, because it's plain wrong choosen
Wrong, because the keyword or category only captures part of the content
Wrong, because I chose the keyword, and someone else (like you out there would have chosen something completely different)
Wrong, because the item belongs to more than one keyword (and no, it doesn't help to include two keywords)
Wrong, because my conceptual framework changes over time and what seems right today, is totally off tomorrow
For all these very good reasons, I've never felt comfortable with the
idea of setting up categories of my own. I did not think it would be a wise investment of my time. However, as I wrote in the "Ridiculously Easy Group-Forming" proposal that led Phil Pearson to build the Topic Exchange,
topics have the semi-magical property of implicitly defining a group -
the set of people who are referring to the topic. If a topic gets a
little press, a group can quickly pop up where there was once just an
idea. That is, provided there is a mechanism in place to enable
topic-based aggregation.
OK, so other than group-forming, what happens when topics are
shared? Another key benefit is that it enables newcomers to the
blogosphere who don't really know anyone to home in on stuff that is
meaningful to them.
Some people (including David Sifry, Gary Lawrence Murphy and I) have
been thinking about further implications of shared categories and how
to tackle the problems inherent to that idea. If you want to follow the
breadcrumbs a little bit, I suggest you have a look at "The dynamics of
ridiculously easy group-forming".
Redesign is in the air for many well-linked bloggers, and the ideas of
categories and content types and what to do with them are enjoying a
bit of limelight these days. Some people have mentioned it makes sense
to have a different stream for each type of content, but people like
Jason Kottke want all of them to appear together as a single stream.
(See Richard on this.)
