As you may know, I've been
maintaining (manually) detailed tables of contents of my blog posts
(one per blog 'category') since I started. They're a bit clumsy, but
they get a fair bit of traffic so I know people are using them. Right
now they exist as six 'stories' and I thought it might be interesting
to try to put them together into a single, interactive index. I'm
competent in neither HTML nor Radio's 'outlining' function (I confess I
don't even know how to use anchors properly -- the twisties below and
the links in the graphic above don't work, and links below should
really take you to the specific subcategory within the table of
contents), so I can't
make it pretty or functional, but you can get the idea of how it might work:
 BLOGS
& BLOGGING:
BUSINESS
ARTS
& SCIENCES
ENVIRONMENTAL PHILOSOPHY
POLITICS
& ECONOMICS
CREATIVE
WORKS
My six categories have a total of 40 subcategories,
of which five (Blogs in Business, Technology, Stories & Narrative,
New Collaborative Enterprise, and Environmental & Social Economics
& Law) overlap categories and hence appear under two categories
each. The ten most popular subcategories (most linked, and most
commented-on) are shown in bold. This taxonomy is essentially the same
one I use for my filing cabinet tabs and for my My Documents
subfolders, except that they omit the 'housekeeping' type tabs and
subfolders that house my background papers, messages and private and
personal records.
I am not offering this as any
kind of framework for a 'universal' taxonomy. In fact, I've been
adamant that any personal content management system needs to allow us
to index our documents and messages any way we want,
our way, at whatever level of granularity works best for each
individual. Universal taxonomies just don't work. But if we think of a
blog as the 'public area' of our personal content, the shareable part
of our personal 'filing cabinet', I thought it might make an
interesting case study in how we might best 'present' each individual's
publicly-available 'stuff' for effective browsing by others.
I see the blog, and at a broader level the 'tabs' of our personal
content management system, our 'filing cabinet', as nothing more than
'addresses' or destinations to send content to. So although Microsoft
would have us believe that 'saving' a document or message, 'sending' a
document or message to someone else, and 'publishing' a document or
message to a blog or website, are three fundamentally different
functions and applications, I see them as conceptually
indistinguishable -- they're all actions that move content from one
specific space to another. That's why I have proposed
a single, intuitive Workspace Manipulation and Document Annotation tool
to replace virtually every application users have on their PCs today, a
tool that would finally make PCs accessible to the billions of
technologically challenged among us. But I digress...
I can envision the Interactive Blog Table of Contents working in one of two ways:
- Map Layout: The table of contents would be displayed
graphically, as in the top diagram above. Clicking on any of the 40
subcategory links would replace the map with a hotlinked list of posts
in that subcategory -- showing title, date, author (if applicable) and
a brief synopsis or abstract of each post.
- 'Outline'
Layout: The content would be displayed, possibly
in the blog sidebar, in 'outline' mode: Clicking on the 'Table of
Contents' box would open up the list of the 40 subcategories, and then
clicking on any of them would display (probably in a separate window)a
hotlinked list of posts in that subcategory -- again, showing title,
date,
author (if applicable) and a brief synopsis or abstract of each post.
How useful would this be for you? If you're not one of those that browses my
tables of contents, would this kind of functionality be useful on your
own blog, even if only to help you find your own archived posts without
having to use a hit-and-miss search bar? Could you envision using this
tool more broadly as a means of indexing everything in your My Documents folder and Inbox, and perhaps even all the hard-copy stuff in your filing cabinet as well?
Ultimately, I can see the development of an invisible (to the user)
'metadata layer', which would take our preferred organization of our
personal stuff and translate it into some universal standard, and then
as needed into each reader's personal organization of his/her content,
so that for example if Jon Husband wants to browse my publicly
permissioned content, he won't see it organized as I have, above, but
will instead see it automatically reorganized and relabelled using his personal
taxonomy and nomenclature. I believe this 'metadata' layer development
will be one of the most interesting and important technology challenges
of this century.
In the meantime, if there's sufficient interest,
I'll buckle down and learn enough HTML and Outlining to implement
either solution (1) or (2) above for my blog.
|
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
