The other day I was going on about “knowledge management” on the web and once again extolling the virtues of Conversant, which powers this web site. Disenchanted (why do some webloggers insist on these odd monikers?) wrote a good article about the limitations — many of them self-imposed — that plague many existing weblogs.
I only read a small number of weblogs precisely because of the problems that Disenchanted outlines — too many are simply links without commentary (or worse, links with poorly thought out commentary), very little context, and no easy way to follow an idea or topic (as Disenchanted points out, reading posts organized strictly by the date they were created is difficult to do except when dealing with a very short period of time.)
One of the things I notice about many weblogs is that the weblog is the beginning, middle, and end of that particular corner of the web. I think, however, that a weblog should be used as just one of a number of possible ways of viewing a web site. The chronological view of entries accomplishes a lot of important things. The obvious advantage of a weblog format is that it is very easy to tell at a glance what’s new. I am amazed at the number of sites I visit where I know people are adding articles and essays on a daily basis, but it is difficult to easily get a list of newly added content. The weblog format, by contrast, is simple, easy to follow, and puts new content where it belongs: as the first thing visitors to a site see.
The problem is that chronological order is not the only useful way of presenting information. In fact for a lot of purposes it is a downright lousy way of presenting information. At Scripting.Com, for example, Dave Winer has been writing a lot about Microsoft recently, and more specifically about the controversial Smart Tags that might be included in IE6.
Here’s a little challenge — go to Dave’s site and try to find all of the things that he’s posted to his weblog about Smart Tags. You can do this by doing a search on “Smart Tags” in the Manila search box, but that doesn’t return terribly useful results.
I see this all the time on other weblogs. Somebody writes about a certain topic and I’m curious what else they’ve written about that topic, but trying to find such information is usually like trying to find a needle in a, so I usually don’t bother.
The flip side of this is that with the tools they are using it would take most webloggers far more time than it would be worth to provide such a feature. Now lets look at how you’d accomplish this in Conversant.
Today I posted a story about Barry Bonds. If you look at the front page of this site you’ll see that story accompanied by a picture of a person playing baseball. Click on the baseball clipart and you’ll be swept away to a page which shows every article I’ve written about sports. Too much information there? Then why not visit the Baseball page, which shows every story I’ve written about baseball.
The baseball page actually didn’t exist until I decided to create it as an example for this essay. How long did it take me to set that up using Conversant? About 2 minutes. If I want I could easily go back in there and add some sappy introduction about how baseball isn’t just a sport, it is life in microcosm, blah blah blah.
The flipside is that I can use what Conversant calls “Resources” to place links to such pages within the context of any new stories I publish. For example, on my animal rights site, I have a lot of stories about PETA (the essay on that page isn’t finished, so pardon the mess). The PETA page helps keep track of all of those stories, but how does someone know to get there if they’re visiting the site for the first time? Or if they’ve just arrived at an old story about PETA thanks to a Google search, but decide they’d like to see any other articles I’ve written about PETA?
Well, look at an article about PETA on that site, lets say: Dawn Carr Receives Probation for Miss Rodeo America 2000 Pie. Notice that the first mention of PETA in that story is hyperlinked back to the main PETA page and the title tag (if you’re using IE) conveniently says that the link will take you to more stories about PETA. Again, the software did this almost automatically. I set up a Resource called “People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals,” told the software where to link that phrase to, what title tag to use, and that’s it. Now when I write an article about PETA I just put pipes (the “|” character) before and after the phrase and the software dynamically inserts the link.
What would otherwise have taken so much time to do that it would have been pointless to attempt becomes something that is configured to happen automatically.
That’s what I meant when I was raving about knowledge management the other day. What webloggers (and everyone for that matter) need are tools to make it easier to transform the isolated day-to-day postings into pages and features that put those individual posts in a broader context, and make it easier to link such posts together in meaningful ways.
This, after all, was the original promise behind hypertext, all of which seemed to get lost with all the hype over the rise and fall of the dot.coms. So far, Conversant is the only web-based application that I’ve seen that does this easily and won’t require you to mortgage your house to use (for intelligently managing large amounts of information on a Wintel machine I’ve always been partial to AskSam, though it is both expensive and requires a lot of time to really get the best results). And just like EditThisPage.Com, etc., you can get a free personal site to give it a whirl (they’re betting that like me, you’ll decide you can’t live without the software and upgrade to a paying account — like most wagers, this one’s stacked in favor of the house, though in this case simply because the software is so darned good).