Blog Categories
Scott's recent rant on signal-to-noise in the dotnetweblog community should get people thinking about self-control. Unfortunately, the feedback he received puts the burden on his end (the distribution layer) to create topical aggregate feeds and global categories. That should not be where the responsibility ends.
Get your categories organized! I did and this is what I learned:
1) Divide your content into "original" and "everything else." Make a way for people to avoid your "me too" blogs. Allowing people to filter on this alone could kill half the junk bandwidth out there. I set up three categories for the purpose:
Original Content
My Two Cents (Derivative Content): Used when I've added my two cents to other threads. A mix of original content and duplicated, external content.
Me Too (Duplicated Content): Links or referrals where I add less than two cents. Long-term, no one cares about the day I set up a blogshares account.
I had the urge to put all my Lazy Programming posts into Original Content, but anyone can get at the complete set through the Lazy Programming Category. Ah, the trials of applying normalization to real-life. The point here is to have abstract topics (like "original" and "derivative") to cross-reference against your physical topics (like "C#" or "movie reviews"). You might prefer different divisions like "internal / external," "timeless / limited shelf-life," or "constructive / rants."
2) Don't create topical categories until you use them twice. Garbage-collect and adjust your categories once in a while. It helps to click all your category links to see if they really provide useful groupings. When I started this blog I expected to write more music and XML, two favourite subjects. When I clicked them today they didn't provide solid enough groups to justify keeping either.
3) Avoid uncommon names when a common name will do. I called my links category "Out There" because it seemed both logical and remotely original to me. But it's a poor choice and creates a barrier to every user accustomed to the word "Links." Links might be an over-used term, but I'm kidding myself if I think a "creative" term will be clicked more. The goal is to produce content, ego kills. If you want to start a cult, learn the lesson that the best cults started with content, not ego.
How do you avoid wasting your readers' time? I understand you're busy preparing a new blog for anyone who doesn't already know about InfoPath, but please, give it some thought.