Facibus On Blogging

…there aren’t enough of them.

Don’t get me wrong, I like the BlogRush concept. I joined myself. But the $%^&* categories aren’t finely grained enough to fit the niche here or over at On Blogging Australia. I blog about blogging and (sometimes) about other metabloggers. So my attempts to follow Darren’s advice to pick the right category (and he says that this is hard for the same reason) falls a little flat because there isn’t a blogging/metablogging category in BlogRush.

Pop psychology 101 moment: Matt will pick me up on this and quote the right references as he’s a genuine psych nerd People categorise things to put a boundary around them so that they can be dealt with - excluded from stream of consciousness such that we can do what is in front of us. In my head there is a category of things called ‘elephants’ - because one is not sitting on my keyboard right now I don’t have to worry about any of the things called ‘elephants’. If I think about it, I am concerned about the ivory trade and habitat devastation in Africa and Asia that affects elephants, but I can probably get through my day without having to engage with the concept of elephants. We categorise because we must, and humans are very good categorisation machines. I work as an information architect mainly because I understand that different people categorise things differently and I love to find out why and how they do so.

Categorisation systems fail for a variety of reasons. One of the easy ones to spot is when they are too coarse - that is, there aren’t enough categories to fill the needs of the people using them. Most tagging sites (like Digg and coRank) don’t have enough categories - they use this as a way of limiting the types of posts that they want to promote.

Where BlogRush has gone wrong is to limit the potential usefulness of the concept. They’ve done this by not allowing users to be specific enough with their categories. Contextual advertising (even of shared blog links) relies on the links being clickable - if they aren’t of interest to the people who are reading the blog, they will not be clicked on, and the increased traffic becomes an empty promise.

How do they fix it? Add more categories. Lots more. This needs to be done carefully for the following reasons:

• because different people think differently, coming up with a taxonomy (a pigeonhole system where every blog has only one category) that will work for the greatest number of bloggers is no easy thing. If it was, we wouldn’t need librarians (acknowledging that librarians do a whole lot more than this).
• category labels are going to be an issue - they need to be thought through to avoid confusing user bloggers.
• currently the structure is flat - should they move to a hierarchical model? And if so, which one? Because a lot of Aussie bloggers write about Australia, is it sufficient to have a Country > Australia sub-category? Or should it be Blogs > Australia? And what about Aussie bloggers that blog about Aussie bloggers? Would enough people use a Metablogs > Country > Australia category to make it worthwhile? And if they allowed user creation of categories, would there soon be a Country > Australia > Metablogs category as well as the Metablogs > Country > Australia one? You can probably see how messy this might get in a hurry.

The BlogRush concept is a good one and I believe that it is worth taking part in it as an experiment. But they do need to do something about those %^& categories