EyesOverBuckets says don't worry so much about structuring your data. Google's doing just fine finding the data you need in the unstructured chaos of the internet. But Avi Bryant provides this warning:
Being a good, lazy incremental citizen, it feels like you should probably just impose a minimum amount of structure now, and worry about increasing it later. ... Once you are managing even a moderate amount of data, automating migration to a more structured format, which typically means trying to parse arbitrary text, is extremely difficult, if not impossible
Bruce Eckel chimes in with another take on this topic, seeming to favor more structure, at least more than what Rob Pike (EyesOverBuckets):
I am hunting for the middle ground. On one extreme is a newsgroup, which has all kinds of very good information but in an essentially linear form. It has very little structure (the best we've seen is “threads” but these are only slightly helpful), and so as we've seen again and again, it doesn't scale.
...
The opposite extreme from the newsgroup is a zine. This requires a lot of effort by experts. Most experts already have too much to do, and can't simply add this task to their list. So in this case, the effort is what doesn't scale.
Brave Combo!
tags: ComputersAndTechnology
