{"id":2727,"date":"2004-11-22T23:56:34","date_gmt":"2004-11-23T03:56:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/dbnews\/2004\/11\/22\/delving-deeper-into-categories\/"},"modified":"2004-11-22T23:56:34","modified_gmt":"2004-11-23T03:56:34","slug":"delving-deeper-into-categories","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/2004\/11\/22\/delving-deeper-into-categories\/","title":{"rendered":"Delving Deeper into Categories"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n
\n

Looking back over our
\n posting of last Friday<\/a>, when we
\n introduced our new cat-a-gories<\/a>, we note that it is almost all about
\n our cat, and not about our agories at all. Categories deserve a bit more
\n attention than that, both in theory and in practice.<\/p>\n

While we couldn’t program our way out of a paper bag, we do have a vague
\n idea of what metadata is. It is the secret ingredient that makes all
\n of the verbiage on a blog accessible, manipuable and searchable. It turns
\n our postings into an ingredient, or rather a collection of ingredients,
\n that can
\n be borrowed, remixed, intertwined and rearranged to suit the needs and
\n interests, the individual recipes, of a variety of users.<\/p>\n

The information that can turn our blog postings into an RSS feed is
\n one kind of metadata, allowing readers to aggregate, time-shift and display
\n our work in a variety of forms and formats. The information we impart
\n when we place our postings into categories is another sort of metadata.<\/p>\n

This variety allows the mad rush if ideas, impressions and idiocies
\n which constitute the Dowbrigade News, for example, to be separated out
\n into distinct streams, topics, genres and media groupings, which in turn
\n allows users to remix, counter play, juxtapose, highlight and compare
\n our ideas with a thousand other threads from other sources, weaving a
\n rich
\n tapestry of impression and understanding which cannot be rivaled or
\n reproduced
\n by any existing
\n mainstream or alternative media. <\/p>\n

We have only begun to scratch the surface of what can be done with these
\n individual strands of thought and information. Sites like Frassle<\/a>,
\n micro-content management systems and next generation aggregators are
\n all pushing
\n the envelope on what can be done with this marvelous new way of looking
\n at content.<\/p>\n

On a practical level, an efficient use of categories can please users
\n in a number of ways. We regularly receive mail from readers who like
\n some of our postings and hate others. One of the drawbacks of hosting
\n an eclectic blog, we always figured.  They invariably suggest that
\n we brach out and establish multiple blogs, one for our political and
\n "serious" commentary, and a separate one for the bizarre sex stories
\n and feeble attempts at humor.<\/p>\n

To which we reply – Never! What you see is what you get.  The
\n seemingly incongruous sides of the Dowbrigade are part an parcel of our
\n balanced and broadminded psyche. If our occasional rants and obsessions
\n cause some to wrest gravitas from our serious social and political punditry,
\n so be it. Their loss and no skin off our ass, so to speak. If the folks
\n who enjoy our zanier posts are bored by the politics, skip ’em.<\/p>\n

On the other hand, if they really object to the commingling of fruits
\n and nuts, they can always subscribe to the RSS stream for only the categories
\n they are interested in. By clicking on the picture of our cat, you can
\n go to a list
\n of the RSS feeds for each category<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Finally, in terms of implementation of this important stream of metadata,
\n we must say our present blogging platform, Manila, leaves something to
\n be desired.  While it makes it pretty easy to assign categories
\n to a posting via a pull-down menu, it lacks two abilities we now see
\n as essential to a robust implementation of the technology; multiple
\n categories and nested sub-categories.<\/p>\n

Multiple categories allows content creators to cross classify postings
\n along a number of parameters simultaneously.  This in turn allows
\n many more dimensions for contexturalizing, comparing and cataloging individual
\n information streams.  Nested sub-categories allow for logical organization
\n of information and a branching tree-structure which aids visualization
\n of taxonomies and borrowing and splicing between trees.<\/p>\n

We do like the categorization by pull-down menu method; it is the easiest
\n and most intuitive implementation we have tried.  Dave
\n Winers<\/a> unfinished
\n Channel Z<\/a> software
\n featured a pull-down menu based categorization scheme featuring nested
\n sub-categories,
\n and it looked just like what we had in mind, but
\n we never got a chance to try it our.<\/p>\n

Hopefully. our next blogging platform will feature an integrated outliner
\n for managing both posts and categories, as well as multiple category
\n and nested sub-categories.  Any developers listening?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Looking back over our posting of last Friday, when we introduced our new cat-a-gories, we note that it is almost all about our cat, and not about our agories at all. Categories deserve a bit more attention than that, both … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":299,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2727","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blogging"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2727","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/299"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2727"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2727\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2727"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2727"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2727"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}