AdaptivePath feed, Ethnoclassification in RSS
First, the interesting news. Richard's post reminded me that I hadn't read the content on AdaptivePath's site for a while. These guys are just brilliant with internet usability, but I'd forgotten to scan their site for new info for a while...
(brain trying to tell me something... wait this is a problem I used to have more often... not such a problem on other sites because of... )
RSS!
Sure, I want to read what these guys write as soon as it's available, and since they did the Blogger.com redesign they've gotta have a feed...
Nope. They didn't. So I sent them an e-mail, and less than 24 hours later, they've added one. How cool is that?
AdaptivePath news feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/ap_news
Now for the part you've been waiting for - my thoughts on Ethnoclassification and RSS (sounds like a class I would have done anything to get out of in college).
The basic idea of Ethnoclassification is letting people categorize the world around them. One of the best examples, as Peter points out, is del.icio.us, a shared bookmark system where the users get to come up with the categories for the links. Letting users come up with their own categories has some big benefits - not only is it very user friendly, but it allows users to feed real information into the system much faster than "expert" system designers could. Examples are "moblog" and "cameraphone" on Flickr. There are some downsides to it - users misclassify things and create duplicates : "nyc", "newyorkcity", "newyork", etc.
The payoff of the article is Peter's idea of letting users make the footpaths, then paving over them once the users have defined a general structure.
This is just a quick summary of an already short article - you should just hop on over and read it.
Anyhow, this reminded me of the Categories in RSS feeds. There's a big benefit to freeform Categories early on, but as some general structure emerges it would be nice to have some standard categories. You could always allow freeform Categories, but you provide some standard ones in the RSS schema. That seems like how music genres have emerged in CDDB, and a bit like how usenet newsgroup topics have stabilized. It's nice to be able to set up a new group if it's needed, but there's no point in having microsoft.programming.database.sql, microsoft.database.tsql, databases.microsoft.sql, etc.
Paving the well worn paths improves the user experience by expanding likeminded audiences.
No real necessity to do this now, as the paths are still probably in the creation phase, but something I'd like to see happen. It would be great to be able to search for feeds by topic without relying on string matches, chance, and search engines.