Threadnaught
So, I’ve been considering finishing up and releasing Project Threadnaught.
Threadnaught is a category aggregation system for weblogs, using existing technology to bring weblogs together. Okay, so far, so space age. How does it do it?
I set up a taxonomy of possible categories, probably based on the Library of Congress or DMOZ or something (I was working on basing on the Dewey Decimal System, but having spent a couple of months in corespondance with the company who own the name I don’t really want to risk having any more to do with them. I can, apparently, use the DDC, providing I never use that name. Arseoles to the lot of them).
When someone makes a weblog post about that subject (Say, Cat Pictures) they send a trackback or pingback to http://altru.istic.net/threadnaught/ping/pictures/personal/pet/cats/ky00t and J. Random Blogger, who subscribed to the RSS feed at ttp://altru.istic.net/threadnaught/rss/pictures/personal/pet/cats/ky00t, and who only cares about the really, really ky00t cat pictures sees that it’s happened.
That’s the basic idea. This came about with etcon a while back, where someone set up a place to trackback, and anyone talking about etcon would trackback that, and people who cared could follow it.
And I’ve spent large parts of today (When I’m not installing Linux on the new laptop) considering this again, as I have been for the past few years or so. And I finally decide to write all these ideas up as a weblog posting before I start coding on this…
...and find that Internet Topic Exchange has been doing this exact idea for the last two years.
I need to act faster on these ideas.
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Castellan:
The Dewey system is truly horrible, so I think you had a blessing in disguise there.
Laurabelle:
Ahem. Many librarians would disagree with you on that point.
Dewey has its downsides, of course, but so does any classification system. The nature of classification systems is that they are constructed with a certain worldview, and Dewey (or “Dui,” as he preferred, though his shortened phonetic spelling never caught on like his classification system) happened to be a male American Christian who didn’t really consider that people were eventually going to want to fit lots of books about Buddhism and Islam and Hinduism and Voodoo next to all the books about Christianity. But that was his world, and I don’t think it makes his system “truly horrible” in an absolute sense.
It might be inappropriate for a third-world library, of course (and unfortunately it gets used a lot in just those sorts of places because it’s relatively cheap and easy to use, not to mention well-known), but it really depends on context.
Tell me what classification system you think is better, and I’ll tell you what’s wrong with it too…
P.S. Aq, you’ve confused classification systems (i.e. call numbers) and subject headings. What you wanted for your trackback idea was the Library of Congress Subject Headings or some such, not Dewey. Four beautiful, slender volumes of LCSH. ;-)