Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.
simple, effective ways to categorize
Author: Jon Udell Posted: 9/9/1999; 6:24:18 PM Topic: rss channels via email Msg #: 10847 (In response to 10836) Prev/Next: 10846 / 10848
> His headlines start out with "Talk | ..." or "Review | ...".Yes, I guess I do that kind of thing automatically in many contexts. For the same reason that I automatically rewrite reply titles, so you get to read "simple, effective ways to categorize" when scanning the headlines at discuss.userland.com, instead of "re: Categories + type of content."
These are just little habits, but they add up to a big effect in layered information systems. In traditional writing and journalism fields, the power of the headline is well-understood. It is less well-understood in cyberspace.
Here's another example: HTML doctitles -- that is, the stuff between
and in web pages. These things are an incredible resource, both user-visible and -- crucially -- returned by all search engines. A little attention to fielding and categorization with doctitles pays off *huge* dividends in a number of different ways. For example, a controlled doctitle namespace lets you do a wonderful job of categorizing search results coming out of *any* search engine. This is something almost nobody pays attention to, though.Jon Udell <http://udell.roninhouse.com/>
This page was archived on 6/13/2001; 4:52:32 PM.
© Copyright 1998-2001 UserLand Software, Inc.