Two kinds of content

Two kinds of content

: Fred Wilson says that blogging software is the future of websites. I agree but added this:

I think it’s half the platform. The other is RSS. In the job I left yesterday, one of my undone projects was to convert the architecture of local news sites entirely to RSS: Everything is a feed. So a home page is a feed of latest and biggest stories. A town page is a feed of newspaper headlines, blog headlines, classified ads with the latest listings in the town, forum thread headlines, weather, and so on.

Looked at that way, there are two kinds of content in the world: reference (fed by wiki so it can be updated) and feed (rss, fed by blog software).

The former is lasting but needs to be updated; the latter — news, conversation — is timely and flows. Both need to be found.

So the next layer you need is how to get to the content. That has been navigation and taxonomy. It may — emphasis on may — shift to search and folksonomy. We’ll see.

: Oh, and, of course, it’s not just content. It’s conversation. Links are, obviously, the other means of finding the stuff we want: linksonomy.