[osol-mktg] Re: top-right jumble and other concerns

[Tim Foster]

Hey Eric & all,

(Happy New Year, btw!)

On Tue, 2006-01-03 at 17:17 -0600, Eric Boutilier wrote:
> The best single thing we could do in this regard is get blog posts that 
> are newletter-worthy tagged on del.icio.us (or similar). Ideally this 
> would be done by the bloggers themselves right after they post a new 
> entry. (Using a browser bookmarklet, it takes only seconds to post and 
> tag a new blog entry to del.icio.us.)

I'm not convinced metadata is the solution to the world's
indexing/retrieval problems yet. When you can fix a metadata vocabulary
and rigidly ensure that users of the system are going to use the system
correctly, then it's great - otherwise chaos ensues imho.

Give me a decent document classification system any day (not that I know
of one yet, which is where my reasoning breaks down - sorry!)

> For us, it would work something like this:
> 
> Solaris community (Sun and non-Sun) bloggers tag their posts according 
> to a certain keyword pattern, e.g:
> 
> - Posts about LISA '05 get tagged: sol_comm:lisa05
> - Posts about the Gartner IT summit get tagged: sol_comm:gartneritsummit05
> - Etc.

The list of communities/projects on opensolaris.org could perhaps be
used as a reasonably fixed vocabulary in this sense, so you can pick
bits of news from each community/project. Though that doesn't help when
you start talking about things that cross communities - a Zone running
on a ZFS filesystem being used to Dtrace a Linux application running
through BrandZ, for example.

I'd be thinking you'll end up seeing tags like:

sol_comm:05:lisa
solaris:lisa05
sol:conferencelisa05
opensolaris:lisa
opensolaris:mylisatalk
opensolaris:dtracelisa05
sunengineer:lisaconference
dtrace:lisatalk
etc.

which all mean the same thing, but how can you tell ?

> Then the newsletter item for LISA '05 simply links to:
> 
> http://del.icio.us/tag/sol_comm:lisa05
> 
> Which would take readers to an index page of Solaris community blog 
> posts about LISA '05.
> Sound good?

Yes if you can persuade every OpenSolaris blogger to stick to the system
and have the capability of wielding a big stick on those who don't -
otherwise, or potentially not care about missing interesting content
that was tagged incorrectly or not at all.

Ultimately, I think nothing beats a good editor (which is how Java.net
has been doing it thus far I believe[1] - users submit newsletter-worthy
content and a human/humans processes it by hand) and that same human(s)
is relatively plugged into what's going on in the OpenSolaris world.

 - sorry, don't mean to be a spoil-sport, if there's a good technical
way of doing this, I'm all for it, but maybe we should just start out
doing things the easy (if somewhat more labour-intensive) way until we
work out what sort of content people like to read. After that we can
start to automate it to the fullest extent of the law! :-)

	cheers,
			tim

[1] but those guys manage it *daily* (wow!)
http://weblogs.java.net/blog/editors/

-- 
Tim Foster, Sun Microsystems Inc, Operating Platforms Group
Engineering Operations            http://blogs.sun.com/timf

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