Wednesday, November 30, 2016

Popular Topics in Taxonomies

This month marks the 5th anniversary of The Accidental Taxonomist blog, so it is a fitting time to look back and see which posts were most popular.  Following are the top 10 posts with the most visits (pageviews) from the time they were published to date, with the number of visit indicated:

1)  3722  E-Commerce Taxonomies (Nov 26, 2012)
2)  3267  Taxonomy Software Directories (Apr 11, 2014)
4)  2462  Taxonomies vs. Classification (Apr 2, 2013)
5)  1859  Taxonomies vs. Thesauri (Jan 28, 2014)                         
6)  1743  Digital Asset Management and Taxonomies (May 28, 2012)
7)  1725  Information Architecture and Taxonomies (Nov 9, 2013)       
8)  1670  Taxonomy Design for Content Management Systems (May 4, 2016)                     
9)  1621  Taxonomy Governance (Dec 9, 2013)
10) 1448  Topics and Document Types in Taxonomies (May 6, 2013)

The topic of taxonomies for e-commerce has been the most popular blog since shortly after it was published. This does not necessarily mean that e-commerce is the most common implementation of taxonomies, but it is clearly defined, whereas others, such as enterprise taxonomies, could go by different names, such as business taxonomies, internal taxonomies, organizational taxonomies, intranet taxonomies, etc. Nevertheless, e-commerce is a very significant application of taxonomies. Among my presentations on SlideShare, the presentation on e-commerce taxonomies is also by far the most popular.

Other popular blog post topics on taxonomies tend to be those in combination with other significant topics in the blog title, such as software, ontologies, digital asset management, content management, content management systems, information architecture, and governance. This is not surprising. I am a little more surprised at the popularity of topics “Taxonomies vs. Classification,” Taxonomies vs. Thesauri,” and especially “Topic and Document Types in Taxonomies."

Other posts with high pageview numbers (although not in the top 10) include “Card Sorting and Taxonomies,” “Taxonomies and Content Management, “Evaluating Taxonomies,” “Faceted Search vs. Faceted Browse,” and “Business Taxonomies.”

Blog posts that were less popular (besides the first two) were ones about taxonomists, and not taxonomies, despite the title of this blog, such as “The Remote Taxonomist” and “Mentoring Taxonomists.” The post on “Multilingual Taxonomies” surprisingly has one of the fewest page views, but I had posted it only in my first month, November 2011, of the blog, when the blog was not well known. I would expect it to be found later through searches, though.

Some posts will get high numbers of visits based on their titles, and some will not, such as “Tags and Categories” or “Taxonomies for Multiple Kinds of Users,” even if the topics are of particular interest to taxonomists. It sometimes seems as if I have already posted on all of the leading topics related to taxonomies, and there is not much more to write about. However, here will continue to be interesting topics to write about, but I may simply run out of blog post titles that have high SEO (search engine optimization) value.