We have all faced the problem of trying to decide which category something belongs in when organizing our MP3 or photo collections, especially if something could reasonably be placed in more than one category. And the same thing happens with our channels. Does Wired.com go into News or Technology? Where on earth do I put Boing Boing Blog? In News? Blogs? Miscellaneous? And good luck trying to find something several months later when you've forgotten exactly how you categorized things.
Awasu lets you organize your channels by filing them away in folders. However, there is one key difference from other tree-based programs: channels can appear in more than one folder. Just hold down the Control key when dragging them around.
This seemingly simple enhancement allows for some powerful changes in the way you manage your channels. No longer do you have do decide if a channel belongs under News or Technology. If it belongs in both, then just put it in both!
This becomes particularly useful when you start using channel filters which let you control which channels will appear in My Channels at any given time. For example, you might want to show only those channels that:
In knowledge management parlance, the folder hierarchy you create is a taxonomy of tags. All channels that live in the News folder, for example, are news-related feeds but you can further sub-classify them by creating sub-folders such as News/International and then News/International/Europe and then again News/International/Europe/Moldova.
The order in which channels are shown inMy Channels is controlled by the currently-active channel filter. However, you can easily control the order in which your folders appear by just dragging them around.
Folders are divided into three zones and where a folder ends up after being dragged depends on which zone in the target folder you drag it into (see diagram).