John Battelle's Searchblog

You said (at 1:20) that "these are sites that have been built..." -- but IMHO "sites" aren't built (people generally use the term to refer to locations -- i.e. "site" = "address"). In order to "clarify" this, we need to distinguish between the location and the data and/or code stored at that location (and that is what gets built). I have tried using the term "site" to refer to the location and "website" to refer to the code/data stored at that location (as this is actually the way people actually use those two terms), but people find the similarity between those two strings (and the apparent similarity between those two concepts) too confusing (nonetheless: when people talk about "building", "creating", "making", etc., they usually talk about websites, not sites; and conversely, when they speak of linking or locating sources of information, they usually refer to sites, not websites).

Perhaps this ambiguity will be resolved as more and more genres of websites are created -- e.g. "blogs", "profiles", "communities", etc. (very much like we talk about "books", "magazines", "newspapers", etc. WRT print). Now that I think about it, I'm thinking you may very well need to define such "data structures" for your "measurement" project (in order to avoid "OSFA" issues [let's see if you can guess what that acronym stands for without me saying it explicitly yet again ;] ).

I have been researching this area ("document types", "document type description", form, genre, etc.) for about 2 decades already (yes, since even before the internet was popularized ;) because those are among the most potent typologies of information (in the context of efficient & effective information retrieval methodologies). So this is an area we could, perhaps, collaborate on! (i.e. in a "problem solving" kind of way ;)

I have been researching this area ("document types", "document type description", form, genre, etc.) for about 2 decades already (yes, since even before the internet was popularized ;)