A taxonomy for blog postings
This is a canned post. It was originally written on 2006/08/24.
As someone who posts to a blog more often than is healthy, I’ve started to notice certain clusterings of posting types. Because I know you care about these things, I’ll let you in on my taxonomy.1 The types of posts are ordered in terms of complexity, with the simplest first, and the most complex last.
The simplest type is a link to some idea/meme that already exists on the web. It’s boring. Pretty much someone saying something lame like “Hey! Check out these Mazu Kan fighting harnesses!” The thing I find funny about links is that so many sites are based on them: Boing Boing, Slashdot, Fark, etc. Those sites act as concentrators drawing traffic to sites that are otherwise unknown.
A more interesting type is research, which involves going to a bunch of links and doing some reading, synthesizing, and then posting the result. Wikipedia (when web-only research is done) provides an example of this.
The most interesting type of post is original content. It’s something (be it a photo, story, whatever) that didn’t exist on the web before the post. This makes it interesting, because it actually adds to the content on the intarweebs, and gives us something to chat about.
The taxonomy is pretty simple, but it certainly seems to sum up what I’ve seen. I would be interested to see if any of my readers have something to add.
- A taxonomy is an academic term describing a classification. It’s usually a cheap way of getting a paper published without doing too much original thinking, and lots of reading. (back)
So what kind of post is this? It contains a link, there was some research done, and you could say this is original content (unless someone has already posted this theory already).
Original content is sometimes questionable. Is the post above actually original content or maybe it already exists and we just didn’t know about it.
What about question posts or stuff you put to elicit discussion? Where just a question is raised with the hope the following comments from the readers will either expand or answer it? Like if I posted “Who would win, Batman or Superman?” on my blog. It’s a question that has been raised many times (due in part to Batman fanatics) but perhaps I’m doing so to start a discussion amongst my blog readers (or in my case, “reader”) which would be something original (depending on what my reader has to say). But there was no research done on my part, no link, and no original content in the post. Although I guess you could argue that there is a fourth category, “useless miscellaneous crap”.