Seb’s been thinking about how we could evolve blogging tools to allow people to author more structured (dare I say semantic?) content, so that other people could find their stuff that they find of interest more easily.”
As I said in comments to his post, I think this is a great idea bottom-up, closely tied with communities who define the categories. A group of Austin Bloggers or Emergent Eemocrats or movie lovers finds that they have a topic or set of topics in common, and creates a set of categories that can be used to aggregate posts. The categories come out of the community.
I’m more skeptical about implementing this top-down. An information architect friend was telling me that even professional categorizers categorize things differently over 50% of the time. I don’t think there’s any scheme that’s going to work to auto-create categories, outside of the context of human communities to define those categories.