After several blogging experiments – Mistakes I have made, Awesomesheet and Desire – I begin to have some clarity on what the objective is.
This I knew…
• Keep the network humming with the latest news.
• Distribution improves the quality of one on one communication. The backstory doesn’t have to be repeated over and over with each individual, wearing out the enthusiasm of the teller. Conversations can thus be tuned to the specific shared reality of the participants and go deeper.
This is new…
• A knowledge archive is established. The searchable journal is distilled into a concise reference and resource for creation and self education.
Can I adapt WordPress for knowledge archiving? One strategy is to post with abandon and then extract salient information into pages. The posting tools are adequate but there’s no automation for extraction and organizing.
For instance, how hard would it be to scan the entire blog for links and assemble them on the links page? Wouldn’t it be great if categories could be tagged in the body of a post and then an index built automatically? Perhaps the index could also have a little context, like you get with a google search. This might be a different than just the standard listing of categories.
I want to be able to use what I’ve posted so far to project and revise a plan. The manual approach involves searching the posts for relevant references, compiling the references on a page and editing them into something coherent. Aside from a rigorous maintenance of categories, I don’t have any inspiration for how this extraction and editing could be automated. I don’t think there is any hidden functionality in the basic WordPress feature set – though there may be tools to extend functionality.