I'm not sure why, but my personal webpage has demonstrated a lot of problems i see with existing software--programming languages, operating systems, file systems, content management systems, databases, etc. For years now i've wanted to completely revamp how i create my web pages, but every time i go to plan it out, i find myself redesigning more and more things, until i find myself wanting to start from a completely new processor architecture and build from the ground up.

Hierarchy is one of the things that has bugged me most. I put hierarchy into my image collection, and this pyblosxom blog system organized things in a ridged hierarchy. The problem is that hierarchy never works right for me. This blog entry is a good example, is it a ramble, or a technical article, or a technical speech. And when making the hierarchy, i sat for hours trying to decide if books, articles, and speeches should be subsets of technical and humor or vice versa. The same thing with image categorization, is a sunset an event, or a landscape, or a thing? Eventually i just made myself be arbitrary because i wasn't getting the problem solved.

In Ontology is Overrated (also hear the audio version), Clay Shirky argues that hierarchical categorization is fundamentally not what we want, except in certain very limited situations. I highly recommend skimming what he has to say on the matter.

This is actually why i'm so excited about spotlight. While not everything is there yet, it is headed in the right direction to allow your operating system and filesystem to be your content management system.

In the meantime, i'm off to go work on redesigning our concept of the ALU.