That’s an insightful comment. Maybe categories should be considered somewhat passé.

I recently read seven arguments against meta-data by Corey Doctorow (via Jeff Atwood’s article) which somewhat supported your thoughts even further.

I’ve been pondering both of these over the last few days.

In the end, I couldn’t bring myself to call for the abolition of categories, even here. Perhaps in a blog which remained on topic (I give the example of Gluk, above), it may be feasible. However, for a blog like this one, I think users would rather choose broad categories, like humour or rant, which is not easy to search for.

I think there is room for both Doctorow and me to be right here. Much of Doctorow’s arguments boil down to the idea that you can’t trust random strangers to markup meta-data correctly. I think he is right.

However, within the context of a blog, using past behaviour of the author, you can start to trust their category markups to be better than nothing. I hope that readers will start to trust my categories to that level. (If you are finding them unsatisfactory, I beg you to let me know! Jeff, I will respond to your suggestion soon.)

The only issue would be performance because each feed would have to be generated on the fly when the user accessed the page

I can see your concern. I am still in two minds about whether RSS can really scale. (Heaps of real-world evidence suggesting that it is working day-to-day on large web-sites is hardly sufficient to change my mind! )

One solution here would be to change to a cached query approach. Rather than your clean solution of allowing users to specify the search terms in a URL, have them submit their terms to a web form, store the terms in a database and return an RSS feed with an record identifier.

Each time a post is added, it would be tested against each of the RSS queries, and the record marked as appropriate.

Each time a subscriber fetches the RSS details, it would be a simple database lookup to find the feed and the corresponding articles marked as matching the feed.

This approach would be more appropriate if you had few posts, and many subscribers with similar interests (e.g. lots of them sharing common search terms).

“If you’re reading this, you are a low-value demographic”

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000421.html

That being said, I still use categories on my blog and allow users to subscribe to a few of them via RSS. The Domino platform makes this so easy that I can easily envision giving users the ability to personalize their feeds based on what they want to read. Currently, my category only RSS feed URLs look like the following:

http://www.phigsaidwhat.com/Phigmentb/Phigment.nsf/catcontent.rss?openview&restricttocategory=Article

But they could easily be modified to handle keyword searches or fully boolean search conditions. This might be an example:

http://www.phigsaidwhat.com/Phigmentb/Phigment.nsf/searchcontent.rss?openagent&restricttosearch=Article%20and%20Domino%20near%20Exchange

As long as the search is valid, sending back a personalized RSS feed should be a snap to do. The only issue would be performance because each feed would have to be generated on the fly when the user accessed the page, but this is something the Domino does very well. The key is to have an integrated search engine in your platform of choice.

Sean—

Yes, of course, I believe in you, but only in a philosophical sense. I posit the existence of “Sunny” as a “reader” as an abstract entity of the Platonic Universe.

I am still trying to understand Descartes well enough to prove that you exist. “I blog, therefore I am read.”

Hmmm… Now this is a little off-topic, which raises a whole new question of whether blog categories should be modified as the comments come in, or perhaps comments should have their own categories.