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Wednesday, December 03, 2003
 
Topics and groups

A week ago Tim Bray wrote a post titled Taxonomy Madness:

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
  • Wrong, because it's so arbitrary like a certain classification of animals (and yes, I do realize, that Mark knows this too)
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.

So a possible answer to the questions Tim asked lies in the idea of shared categories, as exemplified e.g. by the Internet Topic Exchange and k-collector, both of which have been quietly gaining traction in the blogging community over the last year or so. (Dave Winer is hinting at developments in a similar direction on his side, using another mechanism.)

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".


What do you think? []  links to this post    3:08:15 PM  
Weblog fragmentation

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.)

What I'm thinking is that if we had a feed bricolage facility it would be trivial for anyone to piece together new feeds as they see fit, starting from a collection of raw feeds. Charles has been thinking about it.

What do you think? []  links to this post    10:26:00 AM  


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