Categorizing weblogs

On October 14, Dave Pollard wrote in his blog about the Open Directory Project (ODP) and the taxonomy challenges of weblogs. Are personal weblogs, which often cover many topics, uncategorizable? If not, where in the ODP should they be listed?

October 22, 2004 by Uncategorized 1

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1 Response

  1. kctipton says:
    October 22, 2004 at 9:15 pm

    Categorizing the uncategorizable
    Topical blogs with a strong focus on one area are easier to place than the “buffet style” ones. They are usually listable in the topical area on which they focus. Subsections of a blog very rarely get a link. OTOH, I’m usually happy to link to individual posts that are full of information (as I think of such posts as nearly equivalent to a news article).

    Blogs that don’t fit well anywhere often go under the personal weblogs area since it’s hard to categorize by topic.

    Blog technology can be used for many purposes. Some DMOZ editors think that if it’s blog technology it must be a blog. That’s incorrect, of course, and if categories exist or get created that fill up with blogs that aren’t, we try to fix it ASAP.

    Dave Pollard noticed that a good number of blogs (sites using blog technology and loosely fitting his definition of a blog) are found in an Online_Journals category. I say that’s not an error, but he’s implying that it is. Those blogs ended up in the journals area because blog technology is being used (primarily) to do journaling and not blogging.

    Dave’s right, it’s not easy to precisely deal with many really good blogs that are hard to categorize. ODP does want to list them, though, more than it wants to spend huge amounts of editor effort finding the perfect place to put them.

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