How to categorise a blog?

Posted by admin | Filed under Computing and IT, Ideas and Thoughts, Pick and Mix

I’m in a dilemma currently, how do I categorise the articles I write on my personal blog. One of the firsts things I did is take a look how Youtube categories content (http://www.youtube.com/browse), it’s pretty broad and generalised. I guess it’s done to make it easy to choose a category, the first one on the list is:
“Cars and Vehicles”, now, if it was me, I think that’s too high up in category depth, cars and vehicles are a form of technology, and they are both forms of Transportation. But I also guess that some people think of “Transportation” in terms of “Trains, Planes, Taxis”, or “Public Transportation” rather than their own Personal vehicles. I would also guess that youtube put the most popular categories, at the root page for category selection. Interestly though, they don’t actually have sub-categories. So they have basically made categories which allow for easy selection of the most popular videos and pasttimes people are likely to film.

To be honest, looking there didn’t really help me, cause I’m just arguing with myself about whether I should keep it simple, or have specific meanful categories and sub-categories. Then about 5 seconds later I think, I doubt most people care, as long as the posts are grouped together into categories that make sense. Then my GUI developer taps on me on the shoulder saying, people should be able to find what they want within a couple of clicks.

I will state, this is my Personal Blog, and it’s not just going to be about technology, internet development, it will include my personal thoughts, maybe comments on sports, who knows. Anyway…here goes, quickfire draft 1:

  • Computing & IT
  • Everyday Life
  • Entertainment
  • Science & Technology
  • Travel & Events
  • News and Politics
  • Ideas and Thoughts
  • Pick and Mix

Okay that was easy, I took some (okay a lot) of the youtube categories. Here’s something that annoys me, surely “Comedy”, “Gaming”, “Sport”, “Music” is actually a form of “Entertainment”. They all overlap horribly, even “Cars and Vehicles” could actually be posted under “News and Politics” if it’s something current like “Fuel Prices reach £2 a Gallon”, I predict that within the next 10 years, you heard it here first.

You know, I’m going to stop there, cause I’ve realised you can’t categorise life that easily, in fact, I now understand why people get paid a lot of money just choosing what category a post should be published under…wait..they are glorified libarians. If you’ve been to a library, you’ll often find a book you want is actually under a section you wouldn’t expect…someone has to make tough choices thats for sure, and you definetely can’t please everyone, like me.

There’s no draft 2 for now….maybe when I’ve written a few hundred articles I might come back and look at this, and say, what the hell was I thinking.

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Permalink | Comments (3) | Apr 11, 2009

3 Responses to “How to categorise a blog?”

  1. dymnfund Says:
    May 4th, 2009 at 10:40 pm

    eh… amazing..

  2. dymnfund Says:
    May 5th, 2009 at 7:27 pm

    any updates coming ?

  3. admin Says:
    May 6th, 2009 at 8:26 pm

    I’ll have another think about it over the next couple of weeks. The problem I’ve got at the moment is, I’ve only been blogging about technology related subjects, my original intention was to blog about anything, so I’ve not really filled out my categories yet as there”s no posts to use them.

    It’s surprising how difficult it is to get categories right, and that’s for any site in general.

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