I’ve started classifying posts into four broad categories:
- General: General posts, typically analyzing HCIR issues.
- Community: Outreach out to the broader community, e.g., cleaning up Wikipedia.
- Noise: Discussion of The Noisy Channel, or about my personal whereabouts.
- Quick Bites: Brief notes about cool finds from the blogosphere or elsewhere on the web.
Please let me know if you find these helpful. I may break out General a bit, though I’m wary of creating artifical boundaries between overlapping subject areas. Also, I would like it to be easier to carry out conversations about topics that span multiple posts. Ideas welcome as always!
p.s. This is a typical example of a post in the Noise category.
The Noisy Channel 
6 replies on “Classifying Posts into Categories”
categories = good
“general” = totally uninformative
how about something more contentful: “enterprise search”, “evaluation” “Cranfield sux”, “wikipedia CFP” or whatever.
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Yeah, I agree that “General” is uninformative. But I’m not sure whether it should be partitioned via categories or via tags. Is there a convention for this in the blogosphere? Assuming I use tags for this, I’m inclined to revisit the current organic set of tags and turn it into a more controlled vocabulary.
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I’ve never understood the differentiation between tags & categories. Tags generally seem to be more haphazard, with less forethought. They both seem to be mostly topical. Long lists of either are tough to navigate, but I abhor tag clouds.
WordPress has something to say about this distinction, too.
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Well, the categories right now are very broad, while the tags are narrow and haphazard. I’d like to clean up the tags, but I’m undecided on whether to turn them into categories. Besides, I’d like to address the issue someone once raised about managing conversations on a topic that extends beyond a single post. I don’t know if there’s an easy way to do that on WordPress by leveraging categories or tags.
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I’ve reduced the list of tags to these:
– collaborative tagging
– Cranfield
– Endeca
– enterprise search
– evaluation
– exploratory search
– faceted navigation
– Google
– information retrieval
– library science
– NLP
– relevance
– Wikipedia
I haven’t taken the step of turning these into categories, but I’m thinking about it (though turning tags into categories seems trickier in WP than vice versa). In any case, curious to hear what folks here think about it.
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I’ve also eliminated the “Quick Bites” prefix on post titles.
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