LazyWeb and RSS: Given Enough Eyeballs, Are Features Shallow Too? by Clay Shirky
About LazyWeb, the current tendency in weblogs where one person describes a feature he wishes to be implemented, and another one, reading the description, implements it.
In order to structure this practice around a tool, Ben Hammersley has designed a version of a LazyWeb RSS feed. You post your LazyWeb descriptions to your blog, with a trackback url to Ben's site. Then Ben aggregates them through the trackback in an RSS feed that people can then subscribe to.
Simple and elegant design.
The part that interested me the most is about the limitation of portals to act as tools for aggregation, compared to RSS feeds:
However, nearly a decade of experimentation with single-purpose portals shows that most of them fail. As an alternative to making a LazyWeb portal, creating an RSS feed of LazyWeb descriptions has several potential advantages
There's a paradigm shift happening in collaborative software land these days thanks to blogs and all development activity around them, where centralized portals will be replaced by RSS feeds and decentralized tools.
I'm curious to see how a portal software product such as the one I develop for a living can add value in this new chain, or get value from it. One things that Portals have for them is a centralized identity, group and preferences management. How can we take advantage of this compared to decentralized systems such as RSS feeds from blogs ? That is the question.
Thanks for this article Clay, and Ben for this new initiative. This is very good food for thought for a closed source Portal developer such as myself :-)
3:30:00 PM 
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