Kottke is redesigning his site, and trying out giving different types of content (book reviews, links, ...) a different look on his homepage.
Jason identifies 5 content types on his site:
- Movie Review
- Book Review
- Remaindered Links ("hey look at this thing")
- A Comment (a comment posted on another site)
- A Regular Post (Jason says this means "here's what I think about this thing". It's really an 'everything else' category - classify here if a post fits in none of the other categories.)
Any given post can be easily classified in 1 and only 1 of these 5 categories - there are no obvious overlaps, especially if we treat A Regular Post as an 'everything else' category. No post will belong to more than 1 content type.
Next, apart from fields that are generic to all content (author, creation date, ...), different content types each have different fields, "microcontent-specific entry fields". For example, a movie review has a title, a link, a rating, a photo, and some text.
The discussion talks about how this can be supported by weblog tools, while staying generic enough. I've been doing this semantic stuff for the past year at my job, and it's hard, but doable and useful.