Appendix A: On TagsI've read Steve Rubel's Micro Persuasion blog for quite a while now. He covers Marketing and Public Relations, is very prolific and seems to have the inside track on what's happening. One of the post types Steve writes is his "Links 07.16.06" for "Links" and the current date. Here's
a sample Rubel "Links" post.
Notice the tags for each item? That's a start, but it’s still lame because if you follow a tag from, say, Technorati, you still pull up the entire post (or in reference to the [DailyNewsShort], the entire day's issue.) That's just too many darn tags.
In my mind we need one item, one or more tags, one URL, and nothing else.
Appendix B: ConstructionalismSomething else we should be able to do with the [DailyNewsShort] is mash it up. Why can't I pull up, say, all "Week in Review" items in a single list, or generate a report for total news items created by week for Q3 2006?
Breaking out news items into single posts would be a great start to leverage all of the supporting functionality in Community Server for blog posts. Using tags, for instance, being able to display all references to “Jose Lema” would be a given.
How much would we need to stretch tagging functionality to mix and match though? A lot, actually. Whether that would be the most prudent course or not, I don't know. We could tag each individual item by its section, "Today's News", "The User Experience", etc. This enables retrieval of all items tagged "Today's News" certainly as well as its associated tags, or those items tagged both "Today's News" and "Jose Lema" to continue our example. But as I said about Steve Rubel’s "Links" posts, that's a lot of tags. It would also wreck havoc on the cs.org Tag Cloud.
When I do this thing, it will be on my own time and start out as a mod to my own dbvt.com site, so we'll see what transpires. In my thinking it would be preferable to find some other way than a purely tag-based approach for extracting individual news items for future mashing and lego constructionalist fun. But the time to think about making it happen is now.
[tags: Steve Rubel, Community Server, Tagging]