Making group-forming ridiculously easy.

Weblogs have a potential for group-forming like no other medium. However I'm convinced that much of it to this day remains untapped. I'd like to explain an idea that I have been bouncing around for a while. It might well be a reformulation of what others have said previously. I believe that implementing this properly would give a nice boost to the blogosphere's social aggregation capability.

Basically the goal is to push the threshold for group creation to an unprecedented low. I think Reed's Law should be refined to state:

The value of a group-forming network increases exponentially with the number of people in the network, and in inverse proportion to the effort required to start a group.

Here's a sample motivating scenario. Not long ago I wrote an item on professions in the blogosphere. The post caught the interest of other bloggers. A few replies came here and there. If you search diligently enough you'll find them, but it's not easy. Presumably, those who have taken part in the discussion would like to hear about it if the topic comes up again, but currently this will only happen by chance. This kind of situation is very common.

The topic is pretty narrow. It wouldn't make much sense to start a Yahoo! group on this. Still, it would be nice to somehow be able to make it into some kind of "focal point" for interested people. If this were very easy, this would allow for quite fine-grained knowledge classification, which would be a boon to those who care for and closely follow particular topics.

Now, the idea is this. When I come across a post on an interesting theme that seems like it might have lasting value, I want to be able to

1. Create a topic, with a title of its own and a definition or description in plain English (which may contain arbitrary hyperlinks). Just "where" the topic is stored is unimportant. The important thing is that it is a public entity.
2. Subscribe to that topic. Subscribing has two effects: it adds the topic to a personal topic list of mine, and it means I'll get posts by other people on that topic in my RSS aggregator because each topic is associated to a shared RSS feed.
3. Post to that topic whenever I talk about it in my weblog. This has to be *easy*, like checking a box or selecting from a drop-down menu displayed under the box where I write my posts.
4. Access an archive of posts on that topic somewhere on the Web.
5. Let anyone edit the description of the topic when important things are added to the "state of the art" on the topic, or when other related topics spring out of the discussion, to let people know where the conversation has branched off.

Basically, from where I stand, this sounds a little like a witch's brew of liveTopics, standalone TrackBack, and this peculiar brand of editable web sites known as wikis.

I haven't worked it out in detail, but wouldn't it be possible to hack a beta of this together as follows?

1. Create a public topic database server.
2. Let each topic "know":
   1. Its name.
   2. The address of the web page defining the topic - this is an easy way for people to associate the topic with a Wiki page.
   3. The address of a particular RSS feed associated to the topic.
   4. The address of the web page that archives posts to that feed. That page could look just like the KMPings page.
3. Make it easy to create a new topic and register it with the server, by asking minimally for element (a), keeping element (b) optional. Upon registration, the server generates (c) and (d).
4. Modify weblog software to make it easy to post to a public topic. This is the hardest part.

[Seb's Open Research]
7:00:21 AM  #  comment []

Really Really Cynical ?. Scott Johnson: ... This recession has been what I've called to friends for some time "The Quiet Recession". If you weren't directly affected then you didn't realize how bad it was. This article spells it out clearly and succinctly.

Now, if I was really, really cynical, I'd comment that America's current Iraq fervor is because a) Bush knows exactly how bad it is and b) he knows that he can't fix it and c) war is a big distraction.

But I'm not cynical.  No I'm not.  Really I'm not. [in The FuzzyBlog!] [s l a m]
6:56:29 AM  #  comment []

Movable Type 2.5 released. Ben and Mena Trott today released version 2.5 of Movable Type on the one-year anniversary of its initial release.

Some of the changes include:

• An integrated version of Jay Allen's mt-search plug-in, called public search
• More accessible default templates that follow Mark Pilgrim's Dive into Accessbility guidelines
• A new default stylesheet (it was the date on the sample that made me realize something had changed!)
• A "Keywords/Metadata" field added to the edit entry screen
• Improved update and trackback ping features
• Optional TrackBack "auto-discovery"

They've also incorporated the survey as a step before downloading, which should help them gather installed-based figures in the future. [Radio Free Blogistan]
6:54:27 AM  #  comment []