Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Re: An RSS categorization proposal

Author:Dave Winer
Posted:9/10/1999; 11:09:51 AM
Topic:rss channels via email
Msg #:10892 (In response to 10884)
Prev/Next:10891 / 10893

Let the author of the piece categorise it, after all they should know the subject better than a librarian otherwise why are they publishing it!

I came to this realization after spending a few hours trawling around Alexa's What's Related database. If they had a way for me to tell them what Scripting News is related to I could have come up with something much more useful than what their engine came up with. They had my site related to a bunch of other sites that had nothing to do with me, and were unflattering (Jerry Springer, Parappa the Rappa) and none of the sites that I'd like to be associated with, for example, Wired (used to work there), Tomalak and Hack-The-Planet (we share a search engine), UseIt.Com (we cover similar stuff and link to each other frequently). And they left no room for movement, they have us related to MacInTouch but not NTBugTraq. Their engine hadn't even picked up the fact that our NT version had shipped and that I was now using NT and covering it. And why no relation to SlashDot? Wouldn't it be great if SlashDot readers learned about Scripting News? I think that's one of the things a category system can and should do, distribute flow among similar sites.

And then looking at Yahoo, they naturally put us in scripting, but the list of other scripting stuff was incomplete. They had Python, but not AppleScript? I don't even think they listed Tcl, and they didn't have Frontier. The web has to be able to do a lot better than that. The problem isn't which classification to use, it's how to set up a flow system so it can grow to cover some small portion of the web in a reasonable timeframe. Yahoo has had five years to get to where it is now. What if the web keeps growing? (Heh heh.) What if someone invents a new scripting language (it's been known to happen).

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