Integrating blogs and DMOZ

The k-collector project is working on integrating topical directories with individual MovableType posts, in an RSS 2.0 feed. DMOZ currently publishes the category list (as RDF), so it'd be possible to assign DMOZ categories to posts on my blog, using DMOZ as a topic cloud.

Over time, I'd assign multiple DMOZ categories to the posts, and then publish the posts in a DMOZ-like tree structure somewhere on my blog (recursive tree-surfing html-producing plugin, I suppose). Eventually all my posts would be heavily weighted with categories, and the linking would be good. "See the other 4 URLs in this category at DMOZ", for instance.

Building mappings between one category and another for the major portals would provide the ability to speak everyone's category structure; then you add automatic feedback routines, and you've got content that publishes itself to the indexers for review. End-to-end Internet publishing, with the categorical depth of Usenet.

I'd like to hear comments on this one; if I'm dumb, say the word :) I'll be happy to listen, and respond.

link: tongfamily

Comments

[rands]

I think this is a phenonmenal idea... I've been chewing on a similar for many weeks now -- so good to see someone working on it.

My thought has been this: Each person/weblog has a certain set of expertise/interests. It often turns out they tend to express these via (using movatabletype terminology) catergories. For example, the categories on my weblog are: apple, buzz, jerkcity, las vegas, management, surf, tech, and writing.

I consider categories to be a basic structured profile of a person/weblog. Problem is, I use my own words to describe my categories which means they make sense to me, but probably don't make sense to the rest of the world. This makes categories useful to my weblog, but not the rest of the world.

Wouldn't it be HANDY if these terms were universal so that people could search against one or more of them? Enter topical directories. With the common language of a DMOZ-like structure, I would be able to search not just for other folks who claim they know/care about a topic I care about, but more importantly, a tool could SUGGEST weblogs that I might be interested in because they share one or more categories with my site.

I've got more to say here.

[Michael Fagan]

I've been away from the net for a while and I've been missing the ENT/RSS/k-collector/topics action. Actually I am commenting here to that I will remember to read it later today or tomorrow. Btw, I was thinking of DMOZ and ENT myself before (see comments).