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Everything Is Miscellaneous — The Problem with Classifying Information
June 11th, 2007 | Posted in Blogging, Recom. Podcasts |
I heard a good podcast on IT Conversations called “Everything Is Miscellaneous.” Dr. Moira Gunn interviews David Weinburger, one of the authors of the Cluetrain Manifesto (which was the Web 2.0 manifesto). One of Weinburger’s points is that traditional models of classification are breaking down. Information cannot be neatly categorized and shelved anymore. Everything is thrown into a giant box labeled Miscellaneous.
His point is best expressed from this review by an information scientist (excerpted on IT conversations):
The big contribution of “Everything is Miscellaneous”, I think, is the concept of “orders”. “First-order order” is structuring, like the placement of sentences in a text or products on a shelf. “Second-order order” is classification, putting information into categories and subcategories, maps,, etc. “Third-order order” is tagging and other meta-data, which allow us to make our own categorization on the fly (”give me a list of all books in this bookstore, divided by century published and subdivided by genre”). It’s a neat set of phrasing, and if the book is not remembered for anything else, hopefully that taxonomy will remain.
In other words, it’s getting harder and harder to organize information. You can’t merely put it into various categories and subcategories. You need to tag the information with abundant metadata and allow users to create the order they want. Or perhaps create a wide variety of views based on different arrangements, associations, and information from the metadata tags.
Reflections for Organizing Blogs
Looking over the 226 posts on my site, I know that archiving by category isn’t working. I like the Related Posts feature more than the category archives, but neither really seems to make the blog navigable. I have an search feature and an index, but do they work for readers either?
In reality, I’d say 90% of regular readers just scan down the home page looking for interesting posts. The rest find my by Google. Weinberger’s book looks like a good read because the explosion of information on the Web has aggrandized the importance of information architecture. At the STC Conference, Jack Molisani talked about the importance of becoming hyphenated. Information architecture is one area to develop expertise.
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June 11th, 2007 at 9:52 am
[...] Technical Writing Blogs blogs by technical writers 9 hours, 16 minutes ago Everything Is Miscellaneous — The Problem with Classifying Information by tom in Blogging, Recommended Podcasts I heard a good podcast on IT Conversations called [...]
June 12th, 2007 at 3:58 am
Interesting, this matches my own thoughts about our internal information as we move to the single source nirvana dreamed of by many technical communicators.
Put all your information in one place, and tag the hell out of it because you never know when, or why, you’ll need it in the future.
But at what point does text searching make that redundant? Who knows.
At the moment I’d take a stab at suggesting that tagging is a way to limit the scope of a text search. As the article suggests.
June 12th, 2007 at 10:58 pm
Thanks for your thoughts Gordon. I think that tagging our content is critical, but many of the traditional help authoring tools don’t really allow you to tag much of anything. For example, there’s no way to tag anything in RoboHelp (to my knowledge). The web 2.0 tools of the current web are light years beyond some of the existing help authoring tools.