In the last couple of days I have been looking at other people’s Bloglines feed collections, and I am really enjoying exploring interesting, funny, and absurd ways of organizing links. I was surprised to notice how many people just leave all their feeds in a flat list even when they have lots of them. I was even more surprised to find out that Lou Rosenfeld‘s didn’t bother organizing his feeds in some really clever and neat hierarchical structure; again, just a flat alphabetically ordered list.
Many feeds, though, are neatly organized, and I think you can understand a lot about a person’s interests and way of thinking by looking at the way they organize their feeds (the more unusual, the better):
- Celebrities, Code, Comedy, Cooking, Cool, Deals…
- people, daily, machine, general, computer/people, computer
- Blogging, cult, furl, google, media, meta, pol, sci, self, social software…
- Technology is for pals, Weblog dorks, News stonk, Politicsh ok, Hate these doods, Awesome duders…
- academia (and more), e-lit (and more), life (and more), news (and more), tech (and more)
- me, comics, friends, prolific friends, service news, science!, tech …
- Geeky, Geeky Friends, Geeky Girls, Girly, Girly Strangers
- friends and relations, l’enfer, misc., news &c., primarily political, rocket scientists, …
[Note: these are really all true and unadulterated category organizations]
So interesting. And you can pay attention on whether somebody has many or few categories, if all the feeds are organized in the proper categories, or whether there is a chaotic mix of single feeds and folders. Now, if I were Jared Spool, I would make a report out of it.
May 23, 2005
My list’s disorganization is mostly a function of my laziness. Plus I find it pretty easy to scan the list of 70 or so feeds.
Maybe another reason is that they’re mostly about the same general topic; hard to categorize.
May 23, 2005
There are a few things I found interesting and revealing.
First, compared to the situation where one tries to organize pre-existing content, in the Bloglines case people pick their content from a extremely large and diverse pool, and then they organize it. It’s like doing a card sorting exercise where you first create your own cards and then you group and name them.
Second, usually there are several independent themes (most commonly web & technology, personal interests, political commentary, news, and so on) that intersect in the blogroll, with interesting effects on the taxonomy.
Third, you can see a split between “standard” and idiosyncratic taxonomies. The idionsyncratic taxonomies–which were much more frequent that I would have suspected–although sometimes harder to decode, convey more information about the person who created them than the standard ones.
Fourth, it’s interesting to see how many people have created “me,” “my blogs” or similar ego-centered categories. I confess, I do have my blog feed on Bloglines (it’s hidden under Friends & Family). Not sure I can explain why. It’s reassuring to see that I have new posts from time to time, I figure.
June 6, 2005
Well, I’m glad you do have your own site on your feeds, because that’s how i found you. I was going through the people who have my site in their bloglines feeds, and found yours.
I was thinking about rearranging my categories from the way they are now, which is pretty unruly, with categories into which some things don’t clearly fit, and a growing “unfiled and misc” category, to categories such as “daily,” “weekly,” “occasional,” etc., and checking them accordingly. I also wish bloglines had subcategories, although that would probably make my life more complicated.
Anyway, nice blog.