AN INTERACTIVE TABLE OF CONTENTS FOR BLOGS

Posted on May 12, 2004 by Dave Pollard

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.

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8 Responses to AN INTERACTIVE TABLE OF CONTENTS FOR BLOGS

  1. Brian says:
    May 12, 2004 at 14:01

    Seems like a lot of (pretty redundant) work to maintain by hand. I don’t know about Radio, but many other blog engines could automate this. Option 2 in particular would be pretty straightforward (albeit still a bit technical) to implement using HTML lists and some Javascript.

  2. Roland Tanglao says:
    May 12, 2004 at 21:32

    yes, brian is right, we (StreamLine at http://www.StreamLinewebco.com) have a solution that would work for you.Email roland AT streamlinewebco.com or call me at 604 729-7924 (remember we are in Vancouver) if you are interested.

  3. Peter Bailey says:
    May 13, 2004 at 00:00

    It sounds like you are heading towards a richly related content world, with content items associated with each other. That’s at the back end. In Sytadel, we implement this through XML for content item storage, and a limited XLink implementation for content item-to-content item relationships. At the front end, you then have mechanisms for rendering these relationships in useful/usable ways (e.g. the map layout or the outline layout). That’s really just a presentation engine implementation issue, and working out what the right interface should be that most people will find intuitive. The nice thing about XLink of course is that you can then effectively suck entire sections of other people’s content into your own hierarchy of content relationships. On the metadata front, the automated translation of your content hierarchy/taxonomy into my content hierarchy/taxonomy is one of those fairly hard problems to solve as you point out earlier in the remarks about “universal” taxonomies. Most of the work I’ve seen in this area revolves around metadata schema mapping and/or registries. There’s quite a lot of work in this area Google metadata schema mapping for example lists some work. I have a recollection of a particular project that was establishing a registry with defined mappings. To do a good job, you need to get down to the thesaurus level mappings when these are used in metadata schemas. Hard …

  4. Brian says:
    May 13, 2004 at 04:48

    …and of course, none of these solutions will really make an impact until they show up on the front pages of a few heavyweight blogging packages (Blogger, Typepad, etc etc).Shouldn’t need a commercial solution, although that’s of course an option. I’m working on a tagging+directory approach within Textpattern for my own use, and hope to release it as a plugin or simple patch for the product *if* it turns out to be reasonably straightforward.

  5. Denny says:
    May 13, 2004 at 06:49

    Your content is so varied that a system like that sounds ideal, but it seems to me that most blogs are much more simple in their focus that they may not need subcategories. I like to see your creative mind at work!

  6. Dave Pollard says:
    May 15, 2004 at 10:39

    Roland: Thanks — I’ll check out the site and give you a call.Peter: Some of the KM practitioners in my network say that my ‘metadata’ requirement is the achilles’ heel of my entire personal KM vision — that it is technically impossible to develop a meaningful and effective ‘translator’ between the ways that different individuals index and mentally organize information and ideas. Maybe that would explain why our attempts to communicate with each other are so imprecise and laboured.

  7. Sherri says:
    May 18, 2004 at 08:17

    I look forward to the day that all blog software has categories (and hopefully sub-categories), with individual feeds for each cat. Better yet, they’d let users pick their categories from checkboxes, and build the feed from that.

  8. Jon Husband says:
    May 19, 2004 at 07:13

    The application we have been working on here in Vancouver is nearing a formal beta test period, and I believe it will address many of the issues you set out in the post.If you’re ever interested in learning more, please let me know.

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