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  May 12, 2004


Dave's Blog Taxonomy
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:

  1. 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.
  2. '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.


12:37:38 PM  trackback []  comment []


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