Grrrr, Can't Participate in Tags from MSDN Blogs

I've been trying to figure out a way to let people join forces on their blogs with combined categories. Ideally anyone could post a Visual Studio tip and developers could consume one feed.  (Everyone wants in on Sara's Visual Studio tips category.) Why not use the Microsoft Blog portal?  Well, VS Tips aren't exactly a mainline taxonomy and too many fragment categories would be a bad thing I guess. Strike one.   

I figured that we could just use the technorati tagging system. This way anyone could contribute their own VS tips.  Hell, this was probably a better idea than the first one.  Unfortunately our version of Community Server doesn't support categories in the RSS feed. Sure, we have "catagories", but not the real kind.  Strike two!  Well, you can manually enter TAG links with the "rel" attribute... Strike three... we're stripping everything but the most basic HTML from the posts.  Back to square one. 

On a somewhat related note... what would my readers think about my jumping off the msdn blog ship onto my own URL?  I've got a few in mind.

Comments

• Anonymous
  May 20, 2005
  Jump ship if it's what you need to do in order to get your blog as you'd like it.
  
  Just be sure you post the new URL!
  
  [But what if he doesn't want you following him? -- ed.]
• Anonymous
  May 20, 2005
  The comment has been removed
• Anonymous
  May 20, 2005

• Forgot to add, that of course if you plan to help in improving the blogs.msdn.com/CS directly, it might make sense to have a hands on approach (own place to try the ideas). But I am a bit cautious about implying such, you probably have much more important things to do as a "community stick-wielder"!

• Anonymous
  May 21, 2005
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  May 21, 2005
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  May 21, 2005
  Betsy, I completely understand how you feel when your "product" is given a poor review by someone. I read this post briefly and wouldn't have thought anything of it other than "Josh doesn't like the current blogging atmosphere, and is encouraging change." I understand a healthy defensive attitude, but honestly, why bring this out in the public when I would venture to say that most people agree with Josh on this. I think it would be so much easier for me, as someone interested in security, to simply subscribe to a "developer security" topic instead of filtering through blog posts like "here's my dog" or "today, the weather was ...". I respect the both of you for your roles, but honestly, why get into an argument about something like this in public comments?

• Anonymous
  May 21, 2005
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  May 22, 2005
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  May 24, 2005
  If you decide to move from blogs.msdn.com, I most likely won't follow. I must wisely choose which sites I "visit" from my corporate network. If your new destination can be seen as questionable (even if it isn't so), then I won't subscribe.

• Anonymous
  May 25, 2005
  Lol, oh no. He's on to your plan to leave blogs.msdn.com, bringing your readers with your, and start an online gambling site Josh!

• Anonymous
  May 25, 2005
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  May 25, 2005
  I was writing about the tagging alternative but remembered then that MS research already has similar ideas used for ranking emails.. I just took that idea unkowingly and glued it to a dictionary/synonym web service for getting similarity for keywords in post categories and blogs to create a RSS feed search where you'd had a keyword and it would find categories with keywords of similar meanings and somehow rank them. So I'll stop here with this over-engineered idea :)

• Anonymous
  January 04, 2008
  PingBack from http://boxing.247blogging.info/?p=427

• Anonymous
  March 12, 2008
  PingBack from http://boxingfightblog.info/betsy-aokis-weblog-self-righteous-only-works-if-you-are-the-only-one/