I have had to be brutally honest with myself about something: I am not always linking back for you as my reader. I do it for my own convenience, and for different reasons. I, Rosa Say, had become a link litterer, guilty of throwing too many readers to the information-overload wolves. I have inserted far too many links in my postings, and I am now cutting back. I had good intentions, feeling I was doing a lot of the navigation work for readers, but I crossed over that line where too much of a good thing gets you in trouble.

Here is another, different view posted today by Gavin at Servant of Chaos (and I do nostalgically agree with his sentiments): What Happened to the Link Love?
Good conversation in his comments, looking at this from several angles.

For me, there is still much value as “the point of even working with the platform” – I very much enjoy the learning it takes me through, and my writing this post was to celebrate and share that process of learning exploration.

Do I wish for better technological advances and true user friendliness? Sure I do, but meanwhile I figure I will gain what I can from what presently exists (and what I can afford.) Said another way, I suppose I enjoy the hunt and have not yet reached the level of frustration you have reached.

But what you wrote in your reply to my comment about the time that it takes is the whole problem.

I can create a website from scratch and create a menu system and folders, then I can open an RSS document and manually enter in all the feed items. Then I can open a metadata document and basically do with each document what Adobe Bridge does with photos. In other words, I can do it MANUALLY.

So if a platform forces me to spend a lot of time doing things manually, whats the point of even working with the platform. Quite Frankly, A lot of the platforms feel as if they are getting between me and the publishing instead of empowering me to publish effectively.

I don’t need all the plug-ins and versatility of the world’s greatest blogging platform and I certainly don’t want to have to learn how to work with php or Ruby on Rails or any other server side programming environment. I just want to be able after having written my content to present the material in a way that is easiest for readers to access, research and cite, critique and discuss without it taking me an extra hour to handle the internet publishing technicalities.

James

Ironically, it was one of those postings which was diary-like, in that it was a journaling of my thoughts within the process of a project that is mostly me-relevant. I was learning so much along the way I hoped it might prove useful to others, at least in different parts of it.

As a writer, and someone who knows she writes to think things through, indexing and archiving have always been of great interest to me. I was not yet a web publisher when I wrote MWA, and when I think back to the creation of that paper index versus what I do today using digital tools it serves as quite a telling picture of my own evolutionary growth in both writing and publishing over the past five years time.

I understand your struggle, for the use of categories versus tags has challenged and frustrated me in several different blogging platforms. A big switch for me in my current TypePad to WordPress conversion includes a very simple distinction that is driven but what I now understand I can do with coding, but fact is I could have done it before with TypePad as well — I just hadn’t experienced the html/css template learning yet.

By the way, the “simple distinction” is that one category for post is optimal, and in contrast, I can use as many tags as I wish to, with my category design now connected to my strategic business model. That one sentence would make for another very long post, and it illustrates how today’s so called ‘user-friendly’ web platforms remain quite a mystery to even the most experienced users.

I love learning to do all of this myself, yet I am also realizing that there is a cost to my do-it-myself-to-learn-it tendencies. Ultimately, my writing up of a post like this with my lessons-learned is my way of coming to my own personal reckoning of the learning I am willing to experience no matter the cost, and strategically growing into a decision to be smarter about developing new partnerships with others much smarter than I am! I would also love to turn a lot of this over to an intern or virtual assistant now, for once the learning has been experienced, the repetition of job execution is way too costly for me to keep handling in light of the other projects I have. It is definitely time to invoke the Pareto Principle; that guideline that says 20% of your activities will account for 80% of your results.

I think you also came to the best conclusion in your comment, understanding that you are “still somewhat vague about some of the features [you] will need” and that you must further attempt “to crystallize [your] specifications.” You can then tackle this from the standpoint of means leading toward a crystal clear end – one you desire most of all.

Your article touches on some of the points that I have been struggling with.

I am looking for a platform that does most of the things which blogging platforms do but which does not focus on the chronological but rather on the categorization. I also want it to have some of the power of a Wiki, but not for other authors but rather to provide a method for constant revising which still allows for the validation of citations.

Perhaps, I can illustrate this by referring to the book “Managing With Aloha.” It is obvious to a close reader of the book that at the time of the writing most of your audience was working in Hawaii or had a subsidiary in Hawaii or was planning to relocate to Hawaii. Now, although your in-person management coaching company’s clientele is primarily based in Hawaii, your personal voice is heard around the world. Therefore, you might feel the desire to revise this or that sentence or explain the definition of a Hawaiian word in a slightly different way. Your original material is still valid but you might feel the need for a rewording. If you came out with a second edition, it would not be too difficult for a term paper writer to distinguish in her citations which specific edition that she was quoting.

But what value would there have been to writing the book as if it were a diary. Very Little.

On a blog when dates are placed, there is a implication made that older material is less valid. And yet although the point that you make in this article is correct that time shifts perspective, and in the social realm that link networks become less and less focused and tend more and more towards irrelevance, yet much of what is written remains valid if it was written regarding objective information.

The other problem that exists is that research is hampered by the diary like style of blogs. A researcher has to rely on tags, links and search tools to arrive at her information. If she went to the Library, she could use the Dewey Decimal system. But blogging platforms do not accommodate easily revisable dynamic categorization.

Yet I want the platform that I am seeking to provide a means of two-way development of the content. I want a platform which allows the visitor to play a role both in having an affect on what I focus on in creation development and in providing critique for revision purposes.

Further, I want a platform which will allow a visitor to cite the current version of an article, and for that citation to always be able to be validated even if I should decide in the future that I disagree entirely with that which I had written in the earlier version.

Unfortunately, at present I am still somewhat vague about some of the features I will need. However this article of yours will probably get read several times by me while I am attempting to crystallize my specifications.

This will be invaluable. Thank You.