Kottkegories:
February 12th, 2002
A comment at Scripting News reminded me about this post at Jason Kottke’s site. Kottke says
“If you had to organize all the stuff that a person comes into contact with, how would you do it? Do you have any experience in doing this, say, within the context of The Brain, a Wiki, or categories for a personal weblog? How did you go about doing it? Got any advice?”
I posted a comment on his site yesterday, and had meant to echo it here:
Great thread! Thanks, Jason. This is a problem that I’ve been gnawing at for years. It began simply as a need to better manage the thousands of bookmarks that I’ve collected since ~1996. Unfortunately, I’ve been unsuccessful in finding what I need. And since I’m no coder, creating it myself isn’t an option, but at one point, I even began writing up the requirements for the software I was imagining. I’ll see if I can dig them up (be easier to find the document if I had the tool I was imagining!)
Basically, what it boils down to is I want the Yahoo engine but expanded to handle files as well. I’m continually surprised that the DMOZ engine isn’t available. I’m not interested in the data; I want the tool. The closest I’ve found is YIHAW, a Zope Yahoo-clone that I could never get functioning correctly.
As for Dave Winer’s suggestion (”Use an outliner.”), I think that might work to help begin to brainstorm categories for a taxonomy, but it’s probably not the tool to manage the taxonomy.
Of course, Six Degrees, which I wrote about this morning might make a taxonomy unnecessary. We hope.
In any event, I got some great links to interesting products out of the comments on Kottke’s post. Worth a look.