It was a slow Sunday this week, so I decided to tackle the long overdue categorisation of the RSS feeds I’ve collected in NetNewsWire. Not the most thrilling of activities, admittedly, but it highlighted a couple of things for me.
Firstly, I realised that I simply grab rss feeds and dump them in a generic ‘holding’ folder. This forced me to eventually sort out all the feeds into categorised folders (see image). This sort of works, but I had a hard time developing a decent structure – i.e. not too granular that there’s only one feed – (e.g. ‘north england rural social software initiatives’), but also not too generic. My desired outcome was to be able to consume vast swathes of information efficiently…but I’m not sure I’ve achieved that goal. I still have to plough through and scan info as normal.
And so much information is mixed up into blogs. A perfect example is Dave Pollard’s brilliant blog that covers “environmental philosophy, creative works, business papers and essays”. Sometimes I love to soak up the riffs and insights on this mix of topics, but other times, I want to say, get into Dave’s latest thinking on green issues, without being distracted through KM stuff. He’s way ahead of me, as I discovered he runs category specific RSS feeds, e.g. http://blogs.salon.com/0002007/categories/blogsBlogging. Excellent.
Which got me thinking about the categories on this site. Which are pretty crap, on reflection. They’re too loose. I think when I put the site together originally, I wanted to capture the range of areas that I thought fed into Evan and my rifts on what made up e-learning. A noble intention, but really I’m not sure they ever really made much sense. And so with a pending redesign, I’m thinking about categories again. First off, I’m not sure whether to even have them.I suppose they’re more useful to me than anyone else, but even my own use of the site is through search (“what have I thought about x?”). And my referrer logs show that almost everyone turns up here through a Google search. So I mainly use the internal search, and most of my readers come through to a specific post.
Hmmm, time for a major rethink. If I do go for categories, they’ll need to be more granular – I think both my and Evan’s perspectives have developed and shifted over the last couple of years, and categorisation should reflect this a little more accurately. Plus, I suppose categories could be really useful for taxonomy, particularly as the site grows. If I do change, we’ll definitely have specific feeds.
And the final part of this ramble is back to my original point – a mess of feeds in my RSS reader. I note with real anticipation the development of ‘smart feeds’ in the upcoming release of Net News Wire. Coooool. I used them with a demo of Shrook I downloaded (nice software, dreadful ‘widescreen’ layout) and they’re bloody powerful. Essentially, Shrook assembled a new collection of data based on keywords or other query data. So I just pointed Shrook at my feeds list and typed ‘blogs KM’ and bingo, an instant datamine. Someone pointed me to feedster the other day, which does the same for the blogosphere, but this is very cool and desktop bound and personal. I cannot wait to see this in NetNewsWire.