blogs and metadata
So, everybody and their brother is looking at metadata these days. Why don’t any of the blog engines have good support for metadata?
Movable Type (which is what I use)
doesn’t seem to have any to speak of.
The whole reason why I’m even interested is that I’ve recently been working on some blogger-as-report functions at work. There is still some amount of hesitation, and I’m don’t think it’s a problem to discuss it.
So, we have a group of peole doing research and producing reports. We have another group of people who consume these reports and make comments, suggestions, etc. They are currently using email. This use of email, I think, is dumb. We should use blogs.
The main reson we should use blogs and not another technology is that blog engines are designed to support the exact sort of activity that is going on: ie publishing information. We do not have a need for collaborative writing (Wiki) since the publisher is the only one writing. We do have a need for commentary, which blogs have demonstrated to be very effective at facilitting and archiving commentary.
We also have a need to only inform people when the published content changes. RSS fits this quite well and, unlike email, leaves the control in the hands of the viewer. Blogs also eliminate the side-conversations that sometimes occur via email discourse that can create confusion.
But what about metadata you ask (since this whole post is supposed to be about metadata)?
The problem with blogs is that when there are more than a few people publishing information it can be impossible to locate information that you are looking for.
Search can help this, but without the ability to search the meaning of a given document you are left only with searching for keywords. The problem with keywords is that it doesn’t often included documents that are related. This is a problem in a research driven organization since the consumers of research might (and often do) lose out on reading related ideas that may be helpful.
I’ve often been in meetings where one group will mention something they are working on only to have another group reply that they have already solved that problem. This kind of even should _never_ happen.
Semantic Webblogs here we come.
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Hm. It does certainly seem like internal blogs would solve a lot of problems. Of course, you’d have to get people using RSS, which might be challenging. As I understand it, many organizations are so tied to email that it can be a hard habit to break.
Still, you could try Movable Type’s keywords field. Authors could assign keywords to entries (MT does have this capability, as I’m sure you know). Those keywords can be used in search, but you could also whip up a quick script that mines the MT database backend directly, pulling all keywords and hyperlinking them all on one page, so someone could get all articles with that keyword. Instead of making people guess keywords when searching, that could help.
Searching by meaning is a little more than I think any mere weblog software is going to get you. At this point, you need to get some Google PhDs working on the problem.
Comment by Joe Chellman — March 13, 2005 @ 3:41 pm