On a Related Topic . . .

For the last few months I’ve been (slowly) updating all of the articles on this site with a keyword system. Whenever I update the site with a new entry, I have a list of 13 categories with numerous subcategories under each of them.

For example, when I posted this article about a new high-resolution image of Saturn, I clicked on a couple options to indicate that it was a Science-related story, and then one level deeper it was an Astronomy-related story.

Not all stories have been marked up in this way, but I am slowly getting through the older ones (it took me awhile to settle on a taxonomy I liked). Now, though, for those stories that are labeled with keywords, a “Related Topics” set of links shows up in the right hand column. Visit that story about Saturn, for example, and a link back to the Astronomy page shows up under “Related Topics.” My recent review of a baseball computer games includes links back to both my baseball page and my computer games page.

This is the sort of thing that Conversant really shines at. I have complete control over what sort of categories and subcategories I want to set up, adding or deleting categories and subcategories takes just a few seconds, and once articles are tagged with this sort of metadata, there are some extremely powerful knowledge management-style applications that can be done without a lot of effort. Changing the template for this site to display the Related Topics information took just a few minutes.