In responding to my notes about topicality, Jeremy Zawodny wrote Weblog topics, blogger micro-brands, and weblog classification. I think all three themes are interesting, but the first and the last grab me enough to continue.
Note: I agree with the blogger micro-brand comment Jeremy makes, but the word brand conjures a vision of The Brand Called You (Fast Company, 1997). Ouch.
Jeremy points out Yahoo classification of his and other blogs is… odd. I didn’t even realize that Yahoo had categorized blogs. Where does anyone fit? Is it just their placement as My Yahoo components? That’s what the example Jeremy gives appears to present.
When you search for John Roberts, you will get this blog as the only result. Hey, at least it’s included. But you don’t get the category placement as a navigation hint, which was one of the original innovations at Yahoo. You do for Zawodny and a few other well-known blogs. That makes sense — focus on what people will care about. But sort of interesting that you can only see the “Most Popular” in the Weblogs category. Makes me think that there are no other blogs categorized. I don’t blame Yahoo, for the same reasons cited earlier, unless you dump them all in a category called Weblogs and just leave it at that. I do wonder if, in the near future, bloggers will be given the opportunity to pay to be listed (higher?) in the Yahoo directory (or just the My Yahoo directory?), like every site must do for the main Yahoo directory now. (Is that still a big business? Still valuable for site traffic?)
All this assumes that the original innovation of directory, with keyword search added as a layer on top, still has a place in today’s web. That innovation was copied by many, including the original snap.com: directory + keyword search = more options for people discovering your classification scheme, which may be useful. But it never scales, which is one reason Google and others just jumped past that whole mess by attacking the problem differently. Yahoo still does show the category when they have it. Good for them, and for users, but they’ve made it a smaller interface element, probably to reflect the fact that many, many sites are not in their directory anymore. Also, they don’t show the entire breadcrumb, just current location and parent. Smart… it was too prominent in the past, but I guess Google’s success forced that change long ago. I wasn’t paying attention.
What does Google do with DMOZ? It’s not exposed on search results. Maybe Google uses DMOZ categorization in helping with relevancy (or used to), but who knows? If you don’t find out about that kind of categorization via search results on Google, it’s like that tree in the forest. Does anyone still care about DMOZ? Are the bitter wars that used to flare up about category editing, etc., still aflame, or has everyone moved on? I know I have.
I’m curious (now) about DMOZ because I’m fan of Syndic8 and the other pioneering work done by Jeff Barr in the syndication space. But I’ve come to wonder if this user-generated directory of feeds is suffering from the same (over?)reaction to the strength of search that has, in my mind, afflicted the Open Directory. In other words, a directory could be useful, but everyone is chasing after the search solution rather than doing the hard (impossible) work of agreeing about classification schemes. Are new bloggers submitting their feeds? Are publishers new to the RSS game, with multiple feeds, still submitting them to Syndic8?
On my personal classification, right here on clock, I need new categories. General, email, maps, books, tech, family, and movies don’t really cut it. However, I’m responsible for a strongly heirarchical classification scheme at work and the maintenance overhead is daunting. I’m not paid to muck around here, so when fatigue sets in, or other distractions arise (read: children), I let them. Also, since I keep promising (believe me anymore?) to move my blog to WordPress from Radio, I have little incentive to complicate things further.
As an aside, Stewart Butterfield ( think Flickr, and tags) is right in many ways when he laughs at global classification schemes, but there are business reasons where being confident that disparate items are connected is useful… so we’ll keep connecting the dots, at least within our corporate walls.
I appreciated Adam Kalsey generating his own Flickr-like weighted list to self-classify his blog after seeing Jeremy’s post. Comments there worry about the “best-seller syndrome,” where a big word (popular) will stay popular. If usage was the driver, it would, but Kalsey’s just monitoring his own output, after the fact. Frankly, even if it were usage driven, by what people read on his blog, would that be so bad? At a time when we’re drowning in information, the clarity of a list sure looks like a lifeline. Don’t we all want to hope that there is something to this wisdom of crowds meme?
I just re-read this, and I can see the threads connecting the various thoughts. Maybe you will, too.