I have a confession. I have many years of blog content. It is hard for me to find posts because I have too many categories (over 200) and an idiosyncratic way of organizing them. No wonder I get emails and DM's from folks telling me they can't find a particular blog post.
That was one of the reasons that lead me to the streamline goal and as part of that a blog redesign. I need get rid of clutter, revise, and re-organize. There's not enough hours in the day.
I've gotten a lot of great advice about how to get started and how to take this blog to the next level. There are some technical and design needs that I can't do myself, so I'm getting help from some of my colleagues, including Laura Whitehead, Tony Karrer, and Michelle Murrain.
A few months ago, I was chatting with Tony Karrer about this problem and he suggested that semantic tagging might work. He told me about his elearning learning portal that might not only solve my blog categorization and finding issues, but also do it for a community of bloggers who write about a particular topic - say nptech and nonprofit bloggers.
We have lists of nonprofit technology and nonprofit bloggers, we have the nptech tag, a NpTech Blogs Twitterfeed Twitter account, and several excellent lists on AllTop (fundraising, nonprofit, social change, and social good). That's a river of blog resources, why add to it?
My problem has been retrieval. I remember a great post from several months ago or I want to find the half-dozen best posts on a particular topic and it is hard to do. Tony Karrer suggested that the approach of aggregating the RSS feeds of blogs, adding in semantic tagging, keyword search and browsable index might help. He set up an experiment with feeds from nptech bloggers.
To be clear Nptech Bloggers is a point of departure. You get summaries and then it takes you to the source. You can browse, organize, or search one RSS Feed or many. For example, for my blog I can create an index with key words organized by concept just for my blog or for all blogs. Or I can create a widget and add it as my sidebar. Here's what it looks like:
Tools
Places
Types
Year
Tony started with a short list of nptech bloggers and a very beta design. So, what do you think?
Very cool stuff. I personally liked the format it was retrieved in and the retrieval time was snappy.
It was also easy to read but I was not looking for a particular post. You might do a test looking for a unique post you did over the last several years to see how effective or not that truly is in relationship to just browsing titles.
Any way looks to be an improvement over the old group them by year method. Good luck !
Posted by: Scott Rooks | January 15, 2009 at 09:40 AM
Fooling around with the nptech bloggers feeds experiment at every click I was like "wow." Tony Karrer is really smart. I've had the same trouble you have with finding articles here. Your putting Google search on your page has helped a lot. I'm not very tech savvy, and often when I'm pointing someone to something you've written, I know they're even less tech savvy than I. The beauty of your posts is you have a real talent for telling people how to. One of the ways that this solution really works is allowing people to scan your post efficiently for the information they really are interested.
You are a real treasure and I'm very happy to see you're working to find ways for people to use your site better. Very many of your old posts are still the best for empowering using Web tools there are. This approach will make it easier for regular readers, but more especially for new readers to benefit from your blog.
Posted by: John Powers | January 15, 2009 at 06:27 PM
Hi Beth,
I use WordPress and have started experimenting with Yet Another Related Posts plugin. It seems pretty accurate.
Does one exist for Typepad?
Posted by: Marc A. Pitman, FundraisingCoach.com | January 17, 2009 at 08:03 AM
Great suggestion. I try to do this, but doing it manually - so it isn't just my content, but pointing to others.
Posted by: Beth Kanter | January 17, 2009 at 09:55 AM