Top 5 Coolest Pieces Of Blog Metadata To Design
This past weekend I was in Charlotte attending their Wordcamp conference and spoke on the Design/Technical panel. Each presenter put together a Top 5 (or 10) list and then based their talk on that. Here’s mine:
(Here’s a link to the larger version.)
Designing Blogs
Designing a blog is similar to designing any other type of website in many ways, but to me I always found it far easier, far more creative. The reason I like designing blogs is because of all the data you get “for free” as soon as you publish your first entry. The time and date it was published, categories, tags, comments, who published it, metadata buried in the entry, the list just keeps going and each piece of metadata is something you can use creatively to add to your design.
In my talk I came up with my 5 favorite pieces of metadata to work with when I’m working on the design. Information visualization is something I’m really interested in so some of the examples in the slide are things I’ve actually used in the past. The bars showing how many entries a categories has is extremely useful. The comment badge that gets fuller and larger depending on how many comments it has, I used that a few years ago and have always wanted to pull it back up.
The audience at the event was less technical than I assumed it’d be, so I pulled out a lot of my semantic metadata jargon and just focused on the possibilities. One thing I glossed over during my talk was how to link tags together to form a semantic mesh of information. Here are some psuedo-steps that you could use to code up something similar to this:
- List all the tags an entry has.
- For each tag, find all other entries you’ve posted that are also using that tag.
- For each entry you find, find all the other tags that it also uses. Each of these tags might be considered a related topic to the original tag.
- Use a Javascript visualization engine to plot the relationship between those tags and entries.
Connecting metadata is a powerful way of showing users how information relates to each other, even when it’s not totally clear what the relation is.
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