The New Harpers.org: Scary

Honestly, my first thought on looking at the new Harpers.org was "I don't get it." Then, as I started to get it, my next thought was "this is scary."

But good scary, I think.

It's a completely different way of thinking about content, especially if you're used to creating websites for a database-backed CMS. Paul Ford explains a bit on his weblog:

Harpers.org makes almost no distinction between data and metadata. Any block of text can have multiple blocks of text living inside of it (as when the Weekly Review contains events), and these blocks in turn can contain multiple blocks, and so forth.

So Harpers' content is arbitrarily granular, and every granule is connected through the taxonomy. Content can contain arbitrary kinds of data. Harper's has facts and events, though in theory you could add whatever--dinner specials, TV listings, things drawn with a very fine camel's hair brush.

It's fascinating in that it manages to be top-down (everything's hung off the taxonomy...) and bottom-up (...which creates its magic out of a pool of well-tagged content) at the same time. It almost has a wiki-ish feel, though without that kudzu quality that wikis seem to acquire over time.

Harper's has also inherited these lovely reverse breadcrumb trails from ftrain:

This is Harry Potter, a form of entertainment. It is part of Entertainment, which is part of Human Endeavor, which is part of Connections, which is part of Harpers.org.

This is really outstanding work and hopefully just the beginning of semantically enriched content on the web.