The future of Weblogging | The Register:
We also need to find ways to categorise posts – to bring the kind of structure that Yahoo! brought to information on the Web – and the seeds of this concept can be seen in Movable Type, NewsMonster and other tools.
This was the kind of problem the WayPath engine’s ancestor was designed to solve: given a text artifact, it could locate others that were similar in content. At the above-mentioned startup where I came to know about this stuff, there was some effort being applied to a categorization engine, but it never saw the light of day.
I have wondered about this for weblogs, given the categorization tools provided in tools like MovableType. Trouble is, in MT you define your own categories: one man’s trenchant political analysis is another’s joke of the day, but both are filed under ‘politics.’ I’m skeptical of assigning a taxonomy: this gets me back to my half-baked idea of using some kind of barcode/SKU for any given post, allowing a user to locate similar ones. But how to do that in an n-dimensional matrix?
fn1. The idea of a straw versus a needle in a haystack is borrowed from Josh @ communications from elsewhere: he discussed how more complicated finding a specific straw is than a needle and while the old expression is understandable, anyone with a magnet can render it meaningless.