[Sigia-l] Redundant information and content

[donna at maadmob.net]

On 14 Jul 2003 at 20:31, Peter Merholz wrote:

> I was an avowed disciple of this view for a long time. I felt that content
> needed to be anchored somewhere, so that people could orient around it, find
> it again, etc. 
> 
> But the more I toyed with faceted classification, the more I realize that
> buddha place isn't suitable for all kinds of content, particularly large
> information stores.
> 
I've been doing some work in this area too. I'm very keen on the second idea and think 
that it offers a lot more flexibility and ability to do clever, useful things with the content.

However, the system I currently am working on has a large distributed author group. 
With this particular group, I ended up designing for information to 'live' in one place 
and designed alternative methods to get to the parts of it that had likely alternate 
paths. The primary reason for this decision was the ability of the authors to create the 
content and either tag it with facets or find a location. I decided that, without 
professional indexers to do the tagging, the quality would be too poor for use, and that 
placing it in a location would be easiest (and would still result in a good overall 
system).

As usual, this was my experience with a particular set of content, readers and authors, 
and may not be applicable to anyone else...

I've written about this before:

http://www.maadmob.net/donna/blog/archives/000066.html

Donna