It’s quiet enough on the football media front these days, not least because there’s plenty of Champions’ League action from mainland clubs, so here’s a thought on blogs and, specifically, irishblogs.ie’s new navigation.
In keeping with the current craze for all things tagged, the blog aggregation site has abolished its categories (or at least its links to categories), one of which, of course was Sport. Instead, it is running a great big tag cloud at the top of its home page, featuring such worthies as ‘Barcamp Cork’, ‘Muster (sic) Rugby’, and ‘Ulster Politics – UUP’. All very interesting and, erm, valid in their own way, but hardly the kind of fare that will galavanize the nation.
So how does one now find a sports blog, or post, on irishblogs.ie? Unless a post is tagged ’sport’, then it’s not going to appear, and tagging every post sport on a sports-based website, or, for example, media on a media-centred site, doesn’t make sense.
FP has nothing against tag clouds (there’ll be one here too as soon as there’s enough material to warrant it) but they are intended to complement, not replace, simple categories. But this seeming change for change’s sake surely is an example of poor navigation and, as one blogger puts it, borking the web.
Sure, football blogs on irishblogs.ie are mostly about EPL, but that may change, and if they can’t be found they can’t be challenged. So please, Irishblogs, can we have our Sports link back?
October 29, 2008 at 1:04 pm
Have you considered contacting Irish Blogs and suggesting they bring back categories?
Your argument is certainly a legitimate one.
October 31, 2008 at 4:33 pm
Hi there,
You can still get the sports channel here:
http://www.irishblogs.ie/channel/sport/.
We were having a problem with the channels in that there was some drift in the set of words that put the cluster together. Having said that the sports one was probably the most accurate.