9.29.2010

Building a better aggregator: Goals, Tagging

The ScienceBlogging site you see now was always intended to be a temporary solution. What we really need is a site that not only aggregates blog posts, but also allows users to classify them, search them, highlight their favorites, point their friends to them, and do many other things we haven't even imagined yet.

Behind the scenes, Bora, Anton, Jessica, Mark, and I have been discussing how to do that, but we realized that limiting the discussion to just ourselves is depriving us of a valuable resource: The people who'll be using and contributing to the new site.

So, over the next few days, I'll be offering some thoughts about how to proceed and inviting your comments. Our plan is to have at least a partially functional, working prototype of the new site by the ScienceOnline conference in January 2011. Let's get that started right now by discussing the goals for the site.

Goals
Here are the goals we came up with for the site:

  • To be a central site where scientists, media, other experts, and laypeople see what scientific topics are being discussed on blogs, in real time

  • To be a resource for locating past discussions

  • To promote science blogging and other online discussion of science

  • To promote scientific accuracy and avoid pseudoscience and crackpottery

  • To be encyclopedic and inclusive

  • To be searchable and filterable

  • To have a system (or multiple systems) for highlighting discussions and posts that are especially topical / high quality

  • To have a means of removing or hiding posts that are not scientific (e.g. vacation photos, political rants unrelated to science, etc.)

  • To be multilingual

  • To be open source / open access


Should anything be added, changed, or removed?

Tags
One of the first considerations will be how to keep track of all this information, and a huge key to that will be classifying it. That's why we think it will be essential to have a unified tagging system in place. If bloggers don’t select their primary tags from a central list, then it will be difficult for users to find posts on the topics that interest them. On the other hand, if bloggers must visit our site to choose primary categories, then usage will suffer. We can allow bloggers to set default tags for their posts using their registration page, but there should be some way to override those settings for individual posts, still using our list of preferred tags.

Could we create a WordPress plugin for this? Or adapt an existing plugin? What about other blogging platforms? What about templates that don’t support tags? One possibility is using a bookmarklet, which would be platform neutral but not ideal. Any other ideas on how to implement a tagging system?

That's just the first bit -- there's a lot more to discuss, but we thought this would be a good way to get the conversation started. So please, let us know what you think in the comments.

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