Easy New topics

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Easy New topics

"Last week, Paolo Valdermarin and Matt Mower released their specification of Easy News Topics 1.0 (ENT), which is designed as an RSS 2.0 module that can add topic and categorization information to an RSS feed. The good news: As a format, ENT is easy to understand, easy for application developers to implement, and pretty easy to parse. Kudos to Matt and Paolo for coming up with a design that is simple but extensible.
Now the bad news: I'm worried about two issues. First is the problem of self-categorization. ENT presupposes that authors can successfully create microcontent with the following properties:

1. It can be placed in one or more categories
2. the author is qualified to categorize the content correctly
3. the author's categories have meaning to the reader

In addition, we then run into a larger problem with self-categorization, which is the question of categorization across feeds. In other words, we have a problem of definitions - one person's rebel is another person's revolutionary."

Category(s): meta-tagging the universe · web apps ·

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