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Peter's Gekko

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Horizontal vs vertical blogging

In application development the terms horizontal and vertical development are sometimes used to distinguish two approaches. Vertical applications target a specific group of users; like health care or insurances in which they support the entire cycle of information management. Horizontal applications target one specific aspect of information management, like word processing, and try to provide this for almost any user you can imagine.

Perhaps this is somewhat farfetched but I think I see something somewhat comparable in blogging as well. See it as going horizontal or vertical through time.

A horizontal blogger slices through loads and loads of blogs and presents a list of interesting finds. Try interesting finds on Google, hit #3 and #4 will direct you to the (old dnj) blog of Jason Healey. The majority of his blog posts are a list of links; Codebetter is happy to be a supplier for such a meta-aggregator.

A vertical blogger is building post upon post; a lot of CB'ers do that. Take Raymond's series on database basics or David who usually finishes his posts with a list of related posts. This way blogging turns into (thanks to comments) a form of interactive publishing.

Just a thought...


Published Jan 26 2006, 08:24 AM by pvanooijen
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Comments

MasterOfTheHat said:

So what about those of us who read all sorts of blogs and then blog about everything and nothing at all? ;)

This is an interesting observation, though...
# January 26, 2006 10:16 AM

Raymond Lewallen said:

Nice perspective. I like the thoughts, and you may have stumbled upon a new way to think about blogging and blogs in general (at least a way I hadn't really looked at it before).
# January 26, 2006 11:07 AM

Raymond Lewallen said:

That's easy enough John. Its getting everybody to agree on the algoritm, the standards for the classification, that requires the work.
# January 26, 2006 12:37 PM

pvanooijen said:

In either direction there are good and bad bloggers.

Personally I favor "vertical", Google is "horizontal" enough for me. Also don't forget the CB link blog:
http://codebetter.com/blogs/linkblog/default.aspx

When it comes to turning this into a nummerical assesment: no problem in deciding on parameters, what the numbers stand for is the real problem. http://codebetter.com/blogs/peter.van.ooijen/archive/2004/06/22/17239.aspx
and
http://codebetter.com/blogs/peter.van.ooijen/archive/2005/06/17/64745.aspx
# January 26, 2006 2:31 PM

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