Avoiding Platypodes

There's a great story about the discovery of the platypus; when the first sketches and pelts were sent back to Europe from Australia, scientists were baffled; all previously discovered animals had been successfully classified into a neat system, and a semi-aquatic creature that laid eggs, suckled it's young, had a venomous spur seemed impossible to their way of thinking; the logical conclusion wasn't that there was a problem with their way of thinking, but that the creature was an elaborate hoax, and that a duck's bill must have been stitched onto the body of a beaver-like animal.

So, with this story in mind, I'm trying to figure out how to set up a system of categorizing my posts that will cover any future platypus that might arise.

I've already got a free tagging system in place, so I can tag anything any way I like, but the top level categorization I've set up is a bit too "deep" for my liking.

"Copyright" doesn't really cover everything I want it to; the idea is that this looks at the impact of digital media on copyright, but also issues like freedom and privacy, and how they are changing the way we behave. First, I thought this was looking like a focus on the legal issues, but the law (as I see it) is really there to provide a framework around society's morality— not the othe way around.

So essentially, it's about the human side of an increasingly networked society. So I've relabelled it "The Social Web."

"Life in the Long Tail" is the catch-all terms I've used for anything I personally find interesting; something that fits into my own niche interests. It's suitably vague to mean whatever I want it to mean, while at the same time being specific enough to mean exactly what I want it to mean, so this is staying.

I've got categories for Music and Photography- but I'm realising that not only have I not written as much about photography as I would have liked, but I can't see anything that's going to change to mean that I'm going to be writing that much about it in the future. So this is going to be incorporated in with my "personal" and "general" categories.

Music is also probably a bit more specific than it needs to be, overlapping with my own personal activity, the "social web" side (copyright etc.) as well as my own niche interests. I'm not sure what it would add as a category that it wouldn't add as just a tag, so that's gone too.

"Me & my life" is something I want to keep for my own personal stuff. I'm going to split the content in here slightly differently; some will be public, but some will be private. The rule I think I'm going to set up is that anyone who either emails me and asks for a password, or registers and tells me that they know my name can see it. That way, I can keep a kind of firewall between my private and public "life."

So the magic number; three categories that— I think— covers everything I want to talk about; what I'm doing, what other people are doing, and what I think's interesting. Hopefully, any platypodes out there will sit in the invisible fourth category of "stuff I don't care about enough to have on my site."

(Apparently, there is no universally agreed plural of "platypus." Scientists often use "Platypuses", or simply "Platypus." "Platypi" is often used colloquially, but this is pseudo-Latin— applying the rules of Latin to a word with Greek roots— the Greek plural would be "Platypodes." Sounds the best to me.)