Thinking about the meaning of “beta” after yesterday’s entry concerning the term’s potential overuse, I wish the term could be alternatively applied in one certain situation – on my blog posts. More generally, what if there was a way to meta-tag content, like blog-posts, with a level of how thought-out the ideas are contained within? One could classify each idea along the typical development stage nomenclature of pre-alpha, alpha, beta, and gold/release. There are many times when I would to have liked to signal to readers that what I am expressing is just a new idea that I am toying with, not something that I’ve spent a lot of time on with hard-felt beliefs. The following are some of my other posts correlated to how developed the ideas were when I posted them:

Pre-alpha: Musing on Three Not-So-Fully-Baked Ideas
Alpha: An Entrepreneur’s Perspective on Information Asymmetry in Bootstrapping
Beta: All That (Content) Glitters is Not Gold
Gold/Release: Why I Like Our NewsGator Investment

Perhaps we could use microformats, tags, or some other system to accomplish this goal? I am just thinking out loud here; perhaps you could say that this post is in alpha stage.