RE the proposed development of a system for discussion and agreeing categories:

I was hoping to actually implement discussion of categories as-categories this weekend, ahead of launching the upgrade to the sigossee site and deploying Alan's work-related learning activity tomorrow. But it's been a ton of work getting the sigossee site upgraded, and I won't be able to do the changes to the trackback system needed, let alone all the extra little templates and query methods :o(

On the other hand, it occurred to me early this morning that, instead of linking categories with entries with trackback to effect the 'other direction' of associating entries and categories, we could either have a special subclass of entry, or just a flag to say that 'in this post, the post is about the categories, not the other way round. Then we could assign a pseudo-category to these entries of 'discussing categories', and render special links for the categories into the entry - pointing to an aggregation interface which shows discussion of those categories etc.

The obvious flaw with the simple flag approach, is that it is easy to envisage cases where there are some categories about the entry and a different set which the entry is about. I shudder at the thought of subclassing the entry types - especially at the thought of making the entry forms even more complicated, but this might be the right approach. there are plenty of other cases for which I've thought of subclassing post : events for instance, or XML structured data like our old lit-review objects.

Needs more thought :o)