This is probably not meant to be directly usable by normal people, but it opens interesting perspectives. Someone is probably going to propose classification/mapification of blogs through an ASP model. Now, please, don’t make the mistake about 1,800 different hosted comment platforms made in the past. Go fee-based right from the start.
Smart aggregation built on top of this might allow a kind of Google Directory for the fresh web, as opposed to the always-stale ODP, which is an awful legacy of ’96 "let’s do it all by hand" thinking.
Today it’s google, google, google, mainly because many browsing navigation schemes suck. You get lists that don’t tell you anything about what’s in them. Look what a lazy site owner will do: this list of books sorted by theme doesn’t even tell you how many books there are within each theme. Do you want to click on, say, Demons, only to discover there are only 67 books in there, so it’s hardly comprehensive, and not worth your Advanced Demonologist Scholar time? If the list/detail browsing implementation on most sites wasn’t so poor, third-party search wouldn’t be as prominent these days.
Besides, information architecture choices bent on showing you less per page to increase page and ad views will lead to the opposite effect (the audience will evaporate, tired of clicking through near-empty pages.) It’s obvious many internal search engines suck on corporate sites, but come to think of it, their browsing experience isn’t better.
Let’s dig out a best practice. Look at this Canon page about their printers. You instantly get to see they have three main ranges: all-purpose, photo and mobile. Models are sorted by decreasing price, in order to put the most expensive and feature-rich right in your face, which is smart merchandising. New "now available" products are told apart from older SKUs. And you can build your own detail pages with a neat comparison feature (which could be even better if product strengths were highlighted, but individual details are most probably static HTML text so they can’t do anything smart at that granularity level.) It’s a shame the compatibility information is not displayed as an overlay to that chart (say, by greying out incompatible models), but overall, this is the commercial web as it’s meant to be: informative and empowering.
HP is not bad at showing their several ranges at a glance, but the following step, set up by range, is less convincing, and the sub-range listing shows less than Canon’s. You can compare up to three products, but sadly you discover that by error. The result seems about similar to Canon’s.
