All Things

I just left a comment on Rex Hammock’s blog rexblog, where he questions whether Marc Andreessen is right to say the demise of the New York Times is inevitable.

It’s probably safe to assume the Times will end up quite different from what it’s been in the past, which very well may upset a lot of folks, but that’s not to say it’s a doomed enterprise. I see two key issues to their survival: how willing are they to embrace new technology (& kill off the old when necessary) and - as I’ve already suggested - will they aggressively look for ways to combat information overload?

Marc Andreessen’s blog is certainly one of the best, nevertheless I’m not so sure it’s wise to write off the NY Times. They appear to be one of the few old-media companies that really seems to get the first requirement, embracing new technology, especially in the time since they became an early adopter of RSS.

Since then, they’ve added some video, made their content free, and now become an investor in Automattic (purveyor of WordPress). Besides, they’ve got a great global brand.

I recall someone arguing about a decade ago that as technology improves, most all colleges (as with textbooks) will end up using lectures by just a few star professors from top schools, that the internet would effectively raise the value of the top “global” brands, while lowering the value of most local brands.

I’m not sure if this is correct, but if so, it might seem to likewise apply to top media outlets, provided they were aggressive about adopting new technologies to spread their content. At the same time, all media players need to be looking hard at how to better package/deliver/archive their content, so that users can access and recall it as efficiently as possible.

Otherwise, the entire media biz is going to have a hard time growing, as we rapidly reach a limit to how much more information we can absorb in this new attention economy.

Internet Duct Tape (formerly EngTech) has an interesting post about proper use of categories and tags in WordPress. Eric says:

“One of my first and longstanding complaints of WordPress is that it does not understand the fundamental difference between tagging and categorizing. Categorizing is like taking all of your socks and putting them into drawers based on colours. Tagging is like sewing a little label on your socks that says when you bought them, how to wash them, … Categories add organization and tags add semantic information. A category can be a tag, but if you use your tags as categories you’ll eventually have a right old mess.”

This is an interesting question because in my experience, there’s never just “one” right way of organizing or presenting information. To find an appropriate way to organize something, you must consider the use and the user.

The goal with tags, categories or whatever scheme is to organize the information in a way that you or another familiar user can find everything, while presenting it to a new user in a way which allows them to easily assess what all is there and then navigate through it to access what they’re particularly looking for. Consequently, I think it depends on the blog how many categories or tags are appropriate.

In my WordPress blogs, I use multiple categories with each post, so I guess that means I’m using them like tags, not true categories. This and my other Blogsome (WordPress) blog, RealCurrents, each have a few dozen categories, used like tags, but it’s not too hard to scan them all as they’re listed on the right side of the page.

My personal blog Light Side on Live Spaces is only allowed one category per post, but that’s OK for a simple blog like that, though I still find myself wanting to add a category every once in a while. If I had a lot of photos on that site, then I’d certainly want a good tagging system, however.

Closer to the other extreme is my aerospace blog (currently still on Xanga), in which I like to note all kinds of esoteric things and so have close to 200 tags,

http://www.xanga.com/AeroGo/tags

so folks can look up specific aircraft, certain famous individuals, manufacturers, etc. This tag cloud really functions more like an index.

For those who want to use categories more properly, as unique groupings, Eric’s post links to an interesting and fairly lengthy discussion by Lorelle VanFossen, Putting Some Thought Into Blog Categories and Tags. She says that

“In the simplest of terms, I think of categories as the table of contents for your blog, a kind of general outline that directs visitors to general topics that you blog about. Tags are more like the index page of a book, a list of key words people will use to search for specific terms.”

She also includes a helpful discussion of how limiting yourself to a small set of categories can help you focus and really think through the purpose for your blog. Nevertheless she notes that she ended up including one category as a sort of “catch-all”, giving it a vague name, “Web Wise”.

Regarding tag clouds, I’ve noticed several ways of presenting them on various sites, typically with the more popular tags in larger type. While that’s a good idea, many times the tags are organized in a rather unhelpful way. I even saw one site where they were in a spiral!

For a site like AeroGo, where it’s likely that the average user is not looking for one of the top 10 tags, it would be better if Xanga presented the tags not only alphabetically as currently, but also in orderly columns, as in a book’s index, though keeping the varying font sizes. This might be overdoing it for many sites, but it would be interesting to see an experiment on a big site like Flickr of several different tag cloud presentations and the resulting click-through rates.

Like Google’s simple but (truly) helpful index, I wonder if on a lot of sites an alphabetical, index-like tag cloud might produce better results, though a simple tag module added to a page wouldn’t have room for all that. In any event, as the “semantic web” becomes more of a reality, I suspect more detailed tagging systems will gain value and prominence, as they help users drill down to the specific information they’re looking for.

Now that even MSN Spaces has a book, Share Your Story by Katherine Murray and Mike Torres (due out March 15th), you’d think there would be several good WordPress books available, but a search of Amazon yields next to nothing.

There is Building Online Communities With Drupal, phpBB, and WordPress, by Robert T. Douglass, Mike Little and Jared W. Smith, but its Amazon reviews were very uneven, and only a third of the book is about WordPress, anyway. So, is there a good, take-it-from-the-beginning WordPress book in the works anywhere?

Apparently I’m not the first to ask this question. Judging from the many comments to this post, about half the folks think it’s pointless, everything is available in the WordPress Codex and other online sources. On the other hand, a substantial fraction think a book would nevertheless be helpful, either because they like having a printed reference, or they want someone to organize all this information in a straightforward package. As for myself, I’d like a book for both reasons.

I can’t help notice that the Spaces book is being published by Microsoft Press. Microsoft has had its own publishing arm for a long time, at least since the mid ’80s, and it seems like their software has done pretty well. My point is that a book is traditionally a basic component of marketing any sophisticated software. Maybe that time is passing, but I’m not sure it’s past yet.

There was a database package, Omnis, that was developed initially for the Mac, and stayed in development for many years. At one point a few years ago I looked into it, but couldn’t get past the fact that after all those years, as far as I could tell it still didn’t have a single substantial book published about it. I just didn’t feel comfortable making an investment in such an important type of software like that.

WordPress seems to be growing in popularity anyway, but it still might help to have a book on it. Considering all the arcane programming topics that get written about, the lack of a book is surprising. I’m going to try to get what I need out of the Codex, which does seem well organized.

In recent years, for most regular folks the standard way of starting to learn (or evaluate) sophisticated software has been to find a book about it, maybe one of the proliferating Dummies or O’Reilly titles, or some other publisher’s, to help get yourself down the initial learning curve. If we’re going to move to online-only documentation, which may be OK, then we need to make up for the marketing shortfall by initiating an appropriate way to point newcomers to the proper starting point.

I suggest the WordPress software have some kind of built-in link to the Codex Main Page that clearly indicates to anyone that lands upon a WordPress blog where they should go to get started. Of course, folks could modify this default setup if they want, but if most every blog pointed uniformly to the correct starting point, then folks would get to the Codex even before they ever start wondering about a book.

In this case, online documentation might actually be preferable to a book, from a marketing perspective. But every little extra difficulty that a potential “customer” has to overcome is so costly to a marketing effort, and every point of confusion or uncertainty presents such a difficulty. Right now, even the WordPress Development Blog, as good as it is, doesn’t make this plain enough.

Geeks will think I am totally nit-picking about this, but considering how fast blogging is growing, and how much work has already been put into WordPress, it would be a shame for people to pass it over for a less capable solution. Blogsome isn’t worried about overstating the obvious, and puts an ad to their starting point twice on each blog page, both prominently on the side and at the bottom. The link should be a distinct one, saying something like, “Get started blogging with WordPress right here.” If we all added that to our WordPress blogs, I bet WordPress would grow even faster.