1. Overview I am going to describe a mobile payments domain : http://www.mobilepaymentstoday.com . It is a good collection of the mobile payments related information.

2. What resources are being used. The scope of the site is describing all the related information regarding mobile payments, its transactions, technology, marketing and news. The author and site’s contributors gather information from other sources and represent their point of view on that particular event/news. Information has a high level of granularity. There are two schemes used to classify information. One (faceted) consists of “research centers”: from Bill Payment and Card Brands to the Money Transfer/P2P and POS. Another classification is based on type of representation: features, news, videos and etc. The site also uses links to the blogs outside of the domain.

3. Why are the resources organized. The highly granular structure of the resources allows to easily and efficiently navigate throughout the site. Users who are focusing on specific type of payments can click on appropriate category and read all the news regarding that specific topic. Those users who are looking for general information on mobile payments can just follow the main news feed.  This approach enables a better interaction with the users.

In addition, the contributor of the site is a Networld Media Group. Besides mobilepaymentstoday.com domain, they have other domains where they describe other sources from specific industries, providing news, forums, reports and other information. One of the forms of monetization is consulting outside clients on different subjects. If you go down the bottom of the site, you can find “Submit RFI” button. You click on it and will see short questionnaire. Any company or person can submit their request to Networld Media and receive a solution to their requests (obviously for a predetermined payment). That is the reason why Networld Media has its own interpretation of the news, and NOT just a mere collection of the news from other sources, which would not add any credibility.

They are like Linkedin: you can follow great news but up to the point. If you request more information, you will have to pay.

4. How much are the resources organized. The domain is highly specialized and would mostly be used by people interested in mobile payments. If site becomes interdisciplinary and will start overlapping with other industries, the purpose of the domain becomes useless. Thus, it is arbitrary to stay in the scope of the name of the domain.

In most of the cases it is difficult to put a single news into a single category. Usually it overlaps with other categories.  Decision about organizing principles depends on the mainstream of “acceptable” categories. Resources are organized by the topics, by videos, by trends – faceted classification approach.

If the potential customer would like to get a consulting from Networld, he has to fill out a standard document with the questions.

5. When are the resources organized. Although, nowadays, information appears online almost in real time (Twitter, Facebook,  etc), mobilepaymentstoday.com does not have to stream its news as soon as possible. The goal of the site is to provide reliable and thoughtful feedback. That is why, it may take several hours of making a conclusion about particular event but it allows creation of credibility in the face of the potential clients.

6. Who does the organizing. There is a single editor, Cary Stemle, according to the site. There is not too much of the information that needs to be organized. That is why it seems logical that one person would be enough to make organizing decisions. It always takes less effort to manage a narrow collection.

7. Other considerations In case the site will grow in scope or will add more categories, it will be important to reorganize the site. One of the principles the creators of the site has to consider is keeping content separate from the presentation.

Another consideration is using more tags and metadata. It will become very useful in the future, especially if the site grows in scope. There will be a trade off, however, if the site will start using metadata. It may deviate from the content uniqueness, hence, losing customers who previously relied on Networld’s opinion.