Blogs and Information Architecture
Of late, I've been getting quite frustrated with the lack of some basic (or advanced) functionalities in Movable Type (MT). Firstly, I need a better search for my readers. When I put up a link, say like the "corporate anthropology" link below, I want to give my readers the opportunity to see ALL links to corporate anthropology available on elearningpost. This will enable them to see the associations, view different perspectives, and more importantly, learn in the process. Put simply, I want to create a "See also…" list with every post. Currently, there are some plugins to do this with MT but they are based on keywords, which usually delivers too much noise. This is where I feel that the current blog tools are too focused on the authors and authoring and not on the readers and reading. Here’s what I expect: Movable Type (and the other blogs) should provide the ability to create and manage a "searching thesaurus" -- basic Information Architecture (IA) stuff. With such a thesaurus in place, all I need to do is to type in "corporate anthropology" as a keyword, and the thesaurus will search out all posts related not only to "corporate anthropology" but also to "ethnography" and present it to readers– simply because both corporate anthropology and ethnography would be defined as "related terms" in the controlled vocabulary. From what I read, this should be pretty basic development effort. Secondly, I have a hard time changing my categories. For example, I know that I have to change my categories to reflect my current interests but the sheer amount of manual work puts me off. For example, how do I create a new category, say, "corporate research", and then populate it with the entries I already have? Btw, have you realized that if I change category names, the file name changes? So, if I decide to rename the category "Information Architecture" to "Information Design", the archive file name changes from "cat_information_architecture" to "cat_information_design". Doesn't this break many links? Any comments?Permalink | Friday, April 02, 2004
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