Thursday, June 13, 2002

Weblogs, communities and tools. Weblogs and communities. There are a lot of great ideas going around and I look forward to the tools and discussion this will generate. However, I think of this issue in a slightly different way, while linking neighborhoods, syndications, etc. all highlight the mechanical connections between related weblogs what interests me most are the conceptual threads of conversation that cross through many weblogs. This means extracting the relevant portions of many conversations, organizing the responses, editorializing the content, etc. Everyone talks about wanting to create communities, but it seems most of the proposals really address how to create collections. To me, a community is about discourse and participation, not just relationships. I don't only want to know who's like me, I want to interact with them to create great ideas and products drawing from our shared experience. What's more, I want to filter or focus on real analysis, not just the link parroting that Blogdex and Daypop tend to highlight. [rjsjr :: Robert J. Seymour, Jr.] Robert is a new voice to me but I'm glad to have met him as he has a great perspective. So far I've been concentrating on the tools to collect together the members of a disparate community in a dynamic fashion (it's the problem that drove me to think about this in the first place) but Robert highlights that the business of community is really about discourse and exchange. Part of the BlogPlex manifesto (in progress) is that a BlogPlexa should actually be able to offer you useful services.  The first service being of course, that it introduces you to other people in a wider community.  Hopefully we can I think we need a discussion about the services/facilities that we can provide to people. If chat, threaded discussion and file sharing were not important to people I think that newer mediums such as Groove and organic mediums such as SlashDot wouldn't have them at their heart. However I think we also need new tools that fit the medium of blogging.  In this message on k-log Phil Wainewright discusses the possibility of shared aggregators: "The key point I'm making is one that I feel would be of immense value in networks of k-logs: being able to read an RSS feed of someone else's RSS aggregation:" I agree and I think it would be interesting to consider how a BlogPlex might offer a shared (& digested) aggregation of the RSS feeds of each the current membership (remember it's dynamic).   [Curiouser and curiouser!] 9:48:13 AM    trackback []     Articulate []

WOW Yahoo groups in your news aggregator. Somehow I had totally missed this feature of Yahoo Groups. In the case that somebody else might have missed it too, if you submit: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Group_name/messages?rss=1 to your aggregator, you will get all posts submitted to that group in your favourite news reader. Just subscribed to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/klogs/messages?rss=1 and it works perfectly. Getting rid of more mail! [Paolo Valdemarin: Paolo's Weblog] [Steve Pilgrim's Radio Weblog] 7:23:20 AM    trackback []     Articulate []

RadioDocs. RadioDocs. "Every great software product deserves great documentation. If this isn't it, it won't be for lack of effort ..." [Excellent!] [Archipelago] 7:01:02 AM    trackback []     Articulate []