thinkfetti

Although there are only a handful of posts I’ve put up on thinkfetti so far, I have been trying to implement some navigation ideas I have. After several hours searching (and trying out alternatives), I’ve decided I will have to try again later.

TagClouds are interesting and visually appealing (and can be used for intrasite navigation), but I would like to be able to display them contextually; after clicking on one tag (”design”, for example), I would like the cloud to display its results for all the other tags present besides “design.” In other words, combining the flat orginizational structure of the tag cloud with the power of hierarchical searching. One article I’ve found describes a theory of tag clusters, which may be closer to the mark. And here is another thoughtful take on how tag clouds may evolve. The same author also refers to faceted classification systems, which may well describe the underlying structure I’m looking for.

Hierarchical categories by themselves don’t solve the problem, because with them, a target document is found by digging down through the hierarchy in the one way it is set up. For example, consider “education/design/music/Beethoven_improvisation”. The “Beethoven_improvisation” page could be found by opening “education”, then selecting “design” from the available options, then selecting “music” from the new list of sub-items, and then selecting “Beethoven_improvisation”. But you wouldn’t arrive at the page by selecting “music” then “design” then “education”, because the hierarchy wasn’t set up that way. And if “education”, “design”, and “music” were regular tags, you couldn’t use them to refine a search; clicking on any one of the tags would just open up a list of all posts with at least that one tag attached.

This touches on an important point about searching: a good search tool will help you find something you want, even when you don’t know in advance how it has been categorized or labeled. This is why physically browsing at a bookstore can be so rewarding, when constructing database queries may not be…

So much to be explored. This is a humble beginning … I’ve installed Movable Type (after only a couple hours of fiddling), which I’m going to try out as a substrate. (edit: now we’re trying out WordPress - less fiddling on this install…)

This is just a placeholder until I get going in earnest…

In the meantime, please visit some interesting alternatives, such as David Weinberger’s well-trodden blog (he is the author of Small Pieces Loosely Joined), an interactive guide to Bartok’s string quartets (an effort to lift us to a level of familiarity with these complex artworks), and, if you are inclined to think about how the web should be heading as far as collaborative tools (and aren’t scared by the open source learning curve), the access grid homepage.

Soon, I’ll explain what these pages and this one have to do with one another.