For those of you who haven't used a blogging tool like Blosxom or PyBlosxom, the way it works is that you put all your blog entries into a directory hierarchy that reflects the categories that you want these entries to go into. This is kind of appealing to people like me, who are used to dealing with files and directories. However, it forces you into the hierarchical mindset — everything must have exactly one place in the hierarchy.

However, it's not hard to imagine a blog post that concerns hacking, unix, and OS X. I've got these categories in separate branches of my directory tree, which makes it impossible for me to put my post in all three places without having it show up three times in the chronological view of the blog. You could imagine a solution involving adding smarts to PyBlosxom with respect to symlinks, but even this strikes me as unsatisfying.

You see, I've been spoiled by iPhoto. iPhoto allows you to assign keywords to each photo, which you can use to create “smart albums,” which are essentially frozen Boolean searches that update automatically as you tag new photos. I guess I hadn't really thought about the potential for something like this until iPhoto gave it to me, but now I want to put keywords in everything! I want to organize my blog using keywords so that entries can show up in multiple places. I want to attach keywords to music files so I can attach descriptors like “instrumental” or “sleepy” to songs and make smart playlists. It's sort of possible to do this now in iTunes, but it should be supported directly.

Actually, I should say I've been spoiled by the potential of iPhoto. Unfortunately, iPhoto's interface for using keywords is downright shoddy. You create keywords by adding them to a pop-up dialog that is extremely awkward to use because it seems to be based on some kind of bastard half-breed non-aqua list widget. You only get one big list of keywords that you can't even rearrange. Good luck if you want to create more than a dozen or so! To do it right we need folders to organize 'em. You also can't assign more than one keyword at once because there's no multiple selection. You can't navigate by keyboard, so assigning keywords becomes a laborious click-fest.

While I'm ranting about iPhoto, I should mention the album interface. Again, you simply get one long list of albums. Thankfully, you can at least rearrange these as you see fit, but once again we really need folders to organize our albums into. It's like the developers of iPhoto only really think in terms of 5 or 10 of anything: albums, keywords, even photos in older versions, which choked badly on large albums.

This brings me to a fundamental rule of interface design: Any time you're letting the user make a collection of things you should give them a way to organize it. At least you need to give them a way to make a hierarchy. Better still is to provide a keyword-based categorization system. (Can you imagine it? A keyword-based system for organizing your keywords? I think it would actually work.