Anne Truitt Zelenka

God, Maui is beautiful, isn’t it? I took this picture on Keawakapu Beach at midday yesterday when I decided to go to the beach instead of writing a blog post. In one month I am moving with my husband, three kids, and dog to Denver. My priorities now are making a smooth transition for my kids and taking as many walks on the beach as I can.

I do have a few topics I’d like to blog about, as I have time after coordinating the move and enjoying my last month in Hawaii:

• Should I buy a Mac or PC for my next computer? We have one oldish PC right now. That’ll continue to be used as the main family computer. Then I need a computer just for me, probably a laptop. I’ve gone back and forth between Macs and PCs in my computing career. I’m intrigued by OS X. I have a UNIX command shell on my PC, but that’s a far cry from having an actual UNIX operating system. However, I’m not sure I want to commit to a new platform and then face the inevitable difficulties in getting a Mac and PC talking to each other.
• How could OPML construct flexible and customized information architectures on the Web? The second item on Joshua Porter’s Web 2.0 Talk is “The information architecture that people use to find your content is, increasingly, not yours.” OPML will provide a great way for human and computer filters to offer different views of content on the Web, not limited only to RSS feeds. The Optimal OPML browser suggests exciting possibilities.
• Why do we overload the concept of motherhood with so much crap? The next blogger who writes “make your software easy enough for my mother to use” goes to the naughty corner.
• What’s next for memetracking platforms? As Alex Barnett has pointed out, the current group of so-called meme trackers aren’t really tracking memes, but we seem to be stuck with the term for now, so I’ll go with it. I’ve been playing around with the idea of a work-family balance memetracking site and feed. Each day, I see relevant stuff flowing through my newsreader. I suppose I could just do a work-family balance blog and post it all in one place, but I want something more automated than that. As I’ve mentioned before, this domain isn’t well served by the current approaches that assume single-topic feeds with heavy cross-linkages. I need some sort of keyword filtering or other classification system along with new methods of measuring importance, like number of comments and authority of the blogger.
• Amalgamation as the future of feeds. I agree with Richard MacManus that the future of feeds is not about individual blogs: “it may mean that the future of blogs isn’t so much people subscribing to full text feeds of individual blogs. But people subscribing to amalgamated feeds of more than one blog, or mixed-author ‘on the fly’ feeds that have a limited shelf life.” The exciting thing about OPML plus RSS is the possibility of getting information according to the way we think about it instead of the way it was produced. Do you remember when companies used to organize their websites according to their own internal organizational structures? That didn’t make any sense. Information needs to be presented as the users want and need it, not according to how it’s produced. I generally don’t want to see articles organized by author or even necessarily by date. I need them organized by topics of interest to me and then perhaps by importance or priority or some proxy to that like popularity.
• Blog design still matters. I’m going to redo this blog using WordPress once I’m settled in Denver and have regular childcare. My favorite thinker in the web design space is Rachel Cunliffe of cre8d design. She recently wrote two articles that I’d like to come back to as inspiration for my next blog design: Blog layouts boring? and On blog layouts and tags as filters. I love the spring colors on her blog—it cheers me up every time I browse there. Blog layout and design will not go away just because feeds are available. Sometimes I’m reading articles in my feed reader and I forget who the author is for a second. It’s disconcerting. The BlogHer web feeds don’t even say who the author of each post is! Though I do most of my feed reading through a news reader, I’ll never give up reading my favorite blogs and memetrackers like Memeorandum on the sites directly. By the way, nice new design, Gabe.

The majority of those topics relate to the idea that you can separate content architecture from content production and content use. Maybe add content presentation to that too. The person producing the content creates it in a way most efficient and satisfying for her. Multiple different editors, human and computer or mixed, create content architectures for browsing, interacting with, and remixing the content. The users of the content approach it from whatever content architecture works best for them. It’s pretty damn exciting.

During this beach break, I’ll continue covering the Tech & Web beat at BlogHer where I recently posted an intro to OPML and learned about Instant Outlining via the comments. That’s one thing I love about blogging; I offer up the little bit I know and get a whole lot more knowledge in return. I’ve also been playing around with my OPML blog, that will shortly transform from OPML Maui to Rocky Mountain OPML. I’ll write about the move itself and my attempts to balance the urge to work with my domestic responsibilities on my mom blog, The Barely Attentive Mother.

Aloha to you.