In this brief post, I'd like to feature the new Tag page on Startup Management, and review what it means and how you can use it.
About two years ago, when I started to curate articles into Startup Management, I was obsessed by the classification and organization of the content. I believed that categorizing content like a library brings clarity to, and increases the usability of that content.
So, I started with an A-Z alphabetical Lexicon concept, and produced a number of topic pages with chronological entries, and a small narrative for each, similar to what Tom Eisenmann used to do on his blog when he compiled his terrific annual list of the best blog posts of the year, like this last one: Managing Startups: Best Blog Posts of 2013.
My general rule is that if an article doesn’t add to the existing body of knowledge in the world of managing and growing startups, it doesn’t get added. Posts that I reject include ones that rehash existing knowledge, don’t add anything concrete that an entrepreneur can act on, or sometimes they are simply too shallow and ranting oriented. Of course, sometimes I miss some good ones, and I will add them later.
My topic criteria has always been oriented towards growing, managing or scaling a tech startup, but I try to avoid very basic start-up stuff.
In the past two years, I have already curated about 2,000 articles (that’s an average of 3 per day), so I’m very selective, estimating that I reject 97% of the content I see daily.
Concurrently, I have been diligently tagging each article added to Startup Management according to an ad-hoc taxonomy that grew to about 1,100 tags.
Basically, I treat Startup Management like a public library for whom I’m the custodian.
The need for this page was obvious to me, because I'm often asked to recommend reading suggesting on such and such topic. So, I decided to put all these tags on one page. Here’s the full Tag page http://startupmanagement.org/tag, and it is sortable by Tag frequency or randomly,
How about the Weekly Roundup I used to email?
Some readers have been asking me about the weekly newsletter when I used to highlight 20-25 articles, and send them via an email. Sadly, I haven’t had the time to do this on a weekly basis anymore, but in consolation, since I’ve become even more strict with the quality of articles, the number of curated articles has dropped to about 20 per week. This means that each one of them is a recommended read, so all you have to do is to follow the site's content regularly.
How do you stay updated?
Web: Hit the River format page at http://startupmanagement.org/river/
RSS Feed: Subscribe with http://feeds.feedburner.com/StartupManagement
Twitter: Follow https://twitter.com/startupmanage
Email: Subscribe here, and I’ll start sending a weekly summary again.
How can you use the Tags?
The tags value is not so much for the daily keep-up of content that I’m curating. Rather, it’s a good jumping point resource if you’d like to see at a glance a handful of well curated articles covering a specific topic, all in one place, and without having to wade through Google results.
For e.g., if you’re interested in Mobile Marketing, here the Tag page for that, http://startupmanagement.org/tag/mobile-marketing-2/. If you’d like to see the latest on Produt Management, it’s here: http://startupmanagement.org/tag/product-management-4/. Or here’s a page on User Conversion: http://startupmanagement.org/tag/user-conversion/.
I hope you will find this Tag page useful. I think every website should have one. It's like an index of content.
(Special thanks to Bill Soistmann for his work on customizing the Tag page beyond what Wordpress provided)