b.cognosco

Radio's Category structure replicates HTML data for every Category. This is very useful for creating "blog channels" -- that is, sending weblog content to different servers, web sites, etc. It is less useful for local, topical aggregation because the content gets replicated as HTML data for every topic and takes up a lot of space.

Matt's product, liveTopics, creates a metadata structure within the weblog that fully supports Radio's Categories and lets you take best advantage of them. At the same time, it creates a topical organization with metadata. liveTopics is being designed to support XML Topic Maps and Phillip Pearson's Internet Topic Exchange.

Using liveTopics you can specify one or more "topics" for any given post. For example: if today you have Categories for Health, BioTech, Wireless, RSS, and Music, Radio will create a page in each Category for any post assigned to them. With liveTopics you assign the post to topic names (likely similar or equal to your Category names) route the post only to your Home page. liveTopics takes care of building a Table of Contents and search structure based on the topics. Very cool. Very efficient.

This leaves the Category structure free to be used for channels -- routing content off to private or special purpose sites -- and makes it easier to find content on any given topic. liveTopics is a another tool that belongs in the Radio power user's toolkit.