Aggregation Is Not Enough

I love reading RPG blog posts on occasion if they fit within my pondering about RPG topics at that particular moment. Those thoughts shift quickly; I have an ephemeral attention span. An aggregation site is awesome if I a) want to peruse something topical now or b) just want to leaf through general topics.

It fails when I want to drill down into a topic and see what has been said not just currently but over a period of time and also because people are apt to under/over tag or categorize their own posts. Both aspects are prevalent. I’ve seen “I fail to blog” posts with a dozen tags or categorizes presented Just as many explore the intricacies of a mega dungeon with no tags or only one sufficient to be picked up the the aggregation site.

To be truly useful, the consolidator needs to keep and retain history along with independently selecting keywords and concepts based on the full post (or other content). Then the information needs to be exposed so topical browsing is available but also searchable. How awesome would it be if you could start topical browsing about goblins and subsequently find alternate goblin settlements pertaining to brewing? That’s just one strange example I suspect the gaming community would love.

Accomplishing this requires natural language processing. The field has come quite a long way in the last few years. Tool kits are available to roll your own solution as well as specialized engines to extract concepts and keywords. In a niche area such as RPG’s, both are going to problematic if applied generically and both can be powerful tools if applied with some level of human intelligence.

I’ve explored one of the specialized engines and its far better than self categorization but fails in some edge cases. I’ve also discussed the idea with a few other individuals; most but not all think the service would be useful. One has progressed further down the path than I have explored thus far.

In the end, I’m not convinced enough people use aggregation sites sufficiently beyond extra promotion for such an undertaking to be useful. Likewise, it requires something beyond the common “shared hosting” site to be done. Periodic processes; a significantly sized database; etc. Most consumers of information, in my experience, are driven not from other sites but from search engines.

Thoughts?