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September 1, 2005
An Alpha Post
Thinking about the meaning of “beta” after yesterday’s entry concerning the term’s potential overuse, I wish the term could be alternatively applied in one certain situation – on my blog posts. More generally, what if there was a way to meta-tag content, like blog-posts, with a level of how thought-out the ideas are contained within? One could classify each idea along the typical development stage nomenclature of pre-alpha, alpha, beta, and gold/release. There are many times when I would to have liked to signal to readers that what I am expressing is just a new idea that I am toying with, not something that I’ve spent a lot of time on with hard-felt beliefs. The following are some of my other posts correlated to how developed the ideas were when I posted them:
Pre-alpha: Musing on Three Not-So-Fully-Baked Ideas
Alpha: An Entrepreneur’s Perspective on Information Asymmetry in Bootstrapping
Beta: All That (Content) Glitters is Not Gold
Gold/Release: Why I Like Our NewsGator Investment
Perhaps we could use microformats, tags, or some other system to accomplish this goal? I am just thinking out loud here; perhaps you could say that this post is in alpha stage.
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Comments (1)
Its an intersting concept. I've played with having a "snarky" tag on LM that flags the post not to be indexed by search engines, I wonder if you'd want to do something similar with pre-alpha ideas?
Also sounds similar to experiments kuro5hin, and Indymedia have done with open editing, where you post an early version of an article, and get the community to help you refine it. (in general my experience is that this doesn't actually work well, but the dynamic of a blog vs. community site is different)
Posted by kellan | September 1, 2005 11:01 AM
Posted on September 1, 2005 11:01