I’ve been a bit harsh on WordPress the last few weeks and need to give them some credit. Credit for being able to grown a large business from open source software and in the process share those gains with independent publishers worldwide.

WordPress is a startup success story.

It can’t be easy to build such a business with the multitude of competing interests that one is confronted with on a daily basis. Interests like monetization, product roadmap, network capacity for scale, software for scale, public opinion, etc.

So last Friday I wrote about not being excited by the new WordPress beta. I’m not. That isn’t because the software isn’t top notch and free. It is because it doesn’t wow me. When it comes to functionality it presents not a single new feature that I myself find better than the previous version. And that’s ok. My wishes are a competing interest with other users and most likely in the minority, for now.

This blog, right here, the one that you are reading is running on WordPress. I am intimately acquainted with it as over the past 6 weeks i have written 134 blog posts using it. Through extensibility I’ve found it to be even more of a solid companion for allowing me to publish with more ease. I’ve blogged about the Zemanta and OpenCalais plugins for the admin panel and they have helped to greatly speed the process up of adding metadata.

With all of that said, WordPress did impress me yesterday with a scantily documented feature, that in my mind makes it more useful. And to make it more exciting it is a feature that I lauded Engadget and its development team for yesterday – URL graffiti.

Apparently, for over a year, hibernating in the WordPress codebase has been the ability to add multiple tags to a URL to create a query that will retrieve the corresponding content. A quick example being this link that looks up posts tagged with engadget, stylecaster and twitter. And they have the RSS component built in as well.

For all of the same reasons that I praised Engadget I will praise WordPress too. There seem to be many lesser documented features that make the platform a stronger engine for publishers. Maybe these are extensibility hooks that added in hopes that they will be enhanced later in the development cycle and they’ve fallen by the wayside.

Regardless, WordPress is a great product for those not wishing to build their own blogging platforms. Which, of course, I would say is north of 99.8% of bloggers. It offers the opportunity to self-publish in a way that very tools throughout history have for the cost.

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/0

Cutting WordPress Some Slack is a post from: TechStartups.com

For those of you unaware, Engadget put on a new face this week and restructured the way stories are found on their site. As part of this new design they began sculpting links with a technique that I’m dubbing URL graffiti. Say what?

They are engaged in a brilliant new system of taggery that shows the maturity of blogs that have thousands of items of content and want to gain the value that they often represent. One method that they have chosen for this is filtering with user chosen tags (graffiti) attached to the end of a tag URL. Example: http://www.engadget.com/tag/att,3g,sony

Why is this brilliant?

It shows a step forward by Engadget and their designers to finding solutions to create value from the long tail. For the public and their own writers there is now an ability to treat all of this content as a reference system. You could also call it a knowledge base, library or archive. Whatever your chosen term, this simple approach to content filtering is hot.

What does it mean?

Access to an entire body of work via multiple tags can begin to yield better search results without forcing a user into a situation where they need to use an ‘advanced search’ feature. These are usually blocks of form elements that easily overwhelm a user’s sense that they can find what they are looking for with ease and underwhelm them with your information architecture skills.

Take the full example URL above with graffiti as an example – then click these three links with varying tag graffiti on the end of them in succession:

1. http://www.engadget.com/tag/att // All ATT tagged content
2. http://www.engadget.com/tag/att,3g // All ATT and 3g tagged content
3. http://www.engadget.com/tag/att,3g,sony // All ATT and 3g and Sony tagged content

As the results wane you are given a better picture of content within Engadget’s archive that meets the tag requirements. In this purest form it is advanced search functionality without the mess.

How to use it?

I found this feature because Engadget was already using it in posts. Their writers can use it to create a better picture of previously written content for users that click through. It can also be used by them as a an internal search capability for research on a topic. When you have multiple authors the chances are high that at some point there is another post or a few within the corpus that is similar and a can be used for reference.

In this current iteration this feature for users is a bit limited. Users can tack on their own graffiti to the URL and get results for these topics, but it is more of a command line interaction. It is powerful but not very user-friendly.

How can URL Graffiti from Engadget be improved?

This is a powerful system for content filtering that needs just a few tweaks and can become a ridiculously valuable to the publisher and to users.

1. Autodiscovery feed added to page
2. Link to this feed in the top section
3. Ability to add a ‘.rss or .xml’ to query for feed access
4. Button to change tag search to ‘OR’ instead of  ‘And’ to increase results pool
   1. Currently all searches are ‘AND’
   2. Ex. ATT and 3g and Sony
   3. New would allow ATT or 3g or Sony
5. Text input box with URL graffiti loaded in it for editing to add new tags
6. Number of results displayed on page

Below is a comp of some of these changes added into the interface. By no means is it perfect but it is a good start to adding some additional value to users. Click the image to see full size.

For your next client or startup keep this URL graffiti approach in mind as an efficient way to solve content filtering. If it is built in from the beginning you can ensure that you are creating a continued value, even if diminishing, for your content. Let your users throw some graffiti on your work.

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/0

URL Graffiti From Engadget is a post from: TechStartups.com