Don and I were talking today, and he bemoaned the one-dimensional nature of Blogger: All the posts are arranged chronologically. If you want to go back and re-read one of his more pithy posts from October of last year, you have know what month it was in, or else wade thru a stack of hay to find your needle.

What website stands for that, these days? Even the smallest site can have an Atomz search engine or similar on it. So what can Google do?

My suggestion: Tags, like Flickr uses. Allow each post to have a number of searchable keywords, making it easier to find the post(s) you wanted.

Let's take that a step further, though. What if tags were combined with RSS? RSS is cool, too, but it's one-dimensional, too. It's set up on a site-specific basis. With tags, though, it can change to a data-specific model.

Now, instead of subscribing to individual RSS streams, I could subscribe to "Mac news and rumors" or "Website marketing ideas" and have all the goodness that is RSS stream news and info from any RSS/Tag site into my reader. And just like flikr, where I can rate photos, I could rate the story, and set my preferences by provider by the quality of story they serve. If they spew out crap, I'll rate them as such, and they'll move down in the feed, much like I can filter the comments on Slashdot.

You heard it here first, people.

This entry was posted by Kevin Creighton, on 6.17.2005. You can leave your response.