On the weblog-devel Bill and

When I posed the question to Designer Andy he lamented that he had to run to work, but offered up this idea.```

Proposal… If there was a way to add context, like a matrix of two large concepts(A & B), ea broken into sub-categories, w/ the checkboxes at the intersection of the sub-categories….

A | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 B

1 x x x x x

2 x x x x x

3 x x x x x

4 x x x x x

5 x x x x x

Maybe, the writer of the blog understands the writing in the context of A and potential readers understand it in context of B

I started wondering what those large concepts would be. Obviously you can do stuff like if you have a bunch of categories like Inkdeep, A Large Head, Erica, and Karen you could make a Blogger meta-category. This seems a bit silly to make categories to manage categories, when does it all stop? As I thought about what Andy said I started thinking about context. What if the system looked at all entries with the meta-category Blogger and realized that certain words occurred more frequently like Inkdeep, A Large Head, Erica, or Karen. It would list like say the top five guesses at the meta-category, and then have an escape hatch for the big screen of checkboxes if you needed it because it guessed wrong.

The better question here though is what purpose do categories serve? How do people use them? It's easy to get caught up in technical fetishism and categorize things because you can. I think most people use them as a basic search facility where the search terms are hard coded. So maybe abolishing categories and making a better free-format search tool is the way to go? At the very least, the categories should be based on like the top five searches people have made on your site, rather than arbitrary categories you assigned when you made the entry. Although, what if the author is writing a number of entries that are part of a serial or something? Then hard-coding the category is important. At any rate, I think if I get a better handle on how people use categories the design challenges might solve themselves.