I think I know where Dave is headed with his new categorization system, or at least this is where I hope he is headed.
What if all Weblog entries had religous use of categories like Dave’s has been applying to his posts since inception?
First off its not realistic to think everyone will change their ways and become the masters of categories. Also what I think might be a story about home improvement to another person could be about modern art. To make this happen we need to involve the Weblog community to categorize the Weblog world.
Here’s one way to do it:
Imagine if the aggregator author’s incorporated randomn peer privilege into their products like Slashdot.org has. But with one big difference. Instead of giving people the ability to moderate a post up or down people, it could be used to apply categories to the posts. This category data would be rolled back up to an impartial set of servers, distributed via P2P and back to the originating weblog. This would give us an open directory for browsing weblogs.
I spend way too much time scouting Google for Weblog posts for topics that I am interested in. A distributed system like this with items tagged by the community in an open hierarchy would be really amazing.
This sort of reminds me of the good old days of the web when Yahoo was so awesome because it had humans building their index.
So is this what Dave is up to?
