When I was a tourguide at Rutgers (part of my undergrad experience), I learned an interesting (though possibly apocryphal) story about how the sidewalks were planned on the Livingston College campus. Apparently, the university deliberately refrained from putting down any sidewalks for the first several years. (For those who don’t know Livingston College, there are no roads inside the campus; hence there are no obvious paths for sidewalks.) Instead, the planners waited to see where students wore tracks in the mud from their frequent comings and goings. They then laid sidewalk in a pattern that closely resembled those student-created paths.
I often think of KM the same way. More often than not, the goal is not so much to figure out how people should or would use knowledge as it is how they do use it. Once we have figured out how people think then we can lay the sidewalk and save them the energy of slogging through the mud every time.
Which brings me to the e-Literate web site. When I started writing, I deliberately ignored the categorization functionality of the software and pulled the links to the auto-generated category lists from my page templates. I wanted to see what I actually ended up writing about before I created those categories. Well, some patterns have begun to emerge and I’m ready to add this functionality back. However, I’m not going to create classic categories in the taxonomic sense, which is to say that they won’t be rigid, mutually exclusive buckets. (Did I actually just use the word “taxonomic” in a sentence?) Instead, they will be themes. It will be possible for a post to simultaneously belong to several themes.
Unfortunately, I strongly suspect that my going back and adding categories to old posts will have the effect of raising them as new or updated posts in the RSS feeds. I see no easy way to avoid this. So, in order to make lemons out of lemonade, so to speak, I’m going to be adding one category at a time, in reverse chronological order, over the next week or so. That way at least RSS subscribers will get to see the logic of the categorization system highlighted by having one theme of old posts pop up in the feed at a time.
This will be somewhat time consuming and, since I have a fair amount of real work to do over the next week, I may not get started for a couple of days. But consider this to be a warning: Construction Ahead.
