A recent entry on Simon Willison’s blog, How we made an API for BoingBoing in an evening caught my eye.
It was based on the release of eleven years worth of post from BoingBoing, which you can download at: Eleven years’ worth of Boing Boing posts in one file!
Curious what subjects you would choose first for creating a topic map of this data set?
And having chosen them, how would you manage their identity to make it easier on yourself to incorporate other blog content?
I am mindful of Robert Barta’s approach of no data before its time for incorporation into a topic map.
Would that make a difference in your design of the topic map or only in the infrastructure that supports it?
I seriously considered trying to tackle this but the very nature of the data makes it difficult. With a tagline like “a directory of wonderful things” the contents are bound to be irregular. Still the archives section provides a starting point
http://www.boingboing.net/archive.htm
with pre defined categories
Technology
Gadgets
Culture
Science
Games
Entertainment
Business
Weird
Steampunk
Video
Community
Book
Add in the various tags and authors as subjects and that would be a good start.
Comment by Edward Iglesias — February 8, 2011 @ 8:45 am
@Edward – I think topic maps with models for improvement by others, may be quite useful for some cases.
That is a map starts off with some basic set of nodes, topics, etc., and those can be added to by uses. Almost a wilipedia model.
What you have listed sounds like a good start!
Comment by Patrick Durusau — February 8, 2011 @ 11:16 am