Argo, the Blog

The Argo team talks about taxonomies. A lot.

This is an unusual thing. Until very recently, saying the word “taxonomy” in a newsroom would elicit looks suggesting you’ve just spoken an exotic strain of Urdu. As topic pages have caught on with news sites, the word’s become a bit less rare. But it’s still strange to find a team in a news organization that so relishes some of the geekier bits of library science.

All the Argo stations have been thinking of taxonomies from the beginning – lists of categories and sub-categories were part of the initial topic proposals. And since, we’ve kept asking them to refine and extend their thinking about how their site’s content will be classified. Some folks might start to wonder about our obsession with descriptive metadata. So here’s an attempt to explain (rationalize?) that obsession.

At minimum, taxonomy will power one important component of all the Argo sites – the aforementioned topic pages. I don’t want these to be afterthoughts. I’m on record as saying that every time a Web surfer runs across a topic page that’s essentially a gussied-up Google search, an angel loses her wings. The topic pages should reflect the thought we’ve put into creating collections of content that will be valuable to users. And they should hook users coming from search engines into serendipitous streams of relevant related content.

But a beautiful classification schema holds promise far beyond topic pages and search engine optimization. Continue reading →