I'm tentatively definining Blog Affinity as the degree of convergence of meaning of the content of two or more blogs.  Hence two blogs currently discussing exactly the same thing will have very high affinity and blogs discussing divergent topics should have low or zero affinity.

A tool that creates BlogPlexes to allow people to find out about other bloggers with whom they share common interests should allow those users to set thresholds which determine how high the affinity between their blogs would need to be before they were considered.

Where a blog was discussing many different topics it might be necessary to allow tuning of thresholds for each different train of thought.  What might a simple interface for this kind of behaviour look like?

 

Half a million RSS feeds.

LiveJournal now offers RSS feeds for all their journals; as of today, that means all 584,777 of them. Just add /rss/ to the end of a journal's URL to get an RSS 0.91-style feed with titles and post links. And each journal now has the updated link tag pointing to the feed. (Initially they were using the old standard, but I told their developers about the updated standard and they were very nice about it and fixed it within 24 hours. Thanks!)

Half a million new RSS feeds overnight. The mind boggles.

[dive into mark]

» Truly!

 

Gaming the community. Derek's posted an interesting analysis of online moderation systems' inevitable gaming, as when Slashdot users Karma-whore. He makes some recommendations about the optimal way to reduce gaming (some of which I disagree with, some of which sound like interesting ideas).

Slashdot has added still more inventive features. A simple but effective reputation management system is in operation now, allowing members to list each other as a friend or foe. The ratings are even public, so you can see who's list you're on. And even better, you can apply a filter to your lists, rating all your friend's comments up, and your foes' down. It's now possible to make it so you never have to see a particular user's posts again: just list them as a foe, and set all foe posts to "-5." In a few clicks, they'll be off your radar forever.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Derek!) [Boing Boing Blog]

» This was an interesting article.  In particular when he goes on to discuss gaming and community and introduces a term, new to me, social capital...

"Let's talk about social capital. That's the buzzword for what we gain when we participate in community spaces. Usually, when I participate in a community, I earn something intangible, yet valuable. So what happens when I also earn something tangible? How does that change the process?"

This is an interesting new dimension for me in how communities behave.  Good stuff.

 

RabbleRouser: "RabbleRouser allows organizations to identify, prioritize, and vote on IT projects in their pipeline. The tool runs on the company's Intranet infrastructure and is a simple, yet powerful, application using all four dimensions of the Quovix approach. You can read more about the "Four Dimensions of Collaboration" here. "

Looks interesting. I'll have to try it out - it's Java based as well.

[rebelutionary]

» I agree with Mike.  Oh and it's free!  Their Four Dimensions of Collaboration and Networked Organizations is worth a read too.

 

Meta Linker from ThinkBlank is an interesting idea.  It uses a clever piece of DOM + JavaScript to annotate each link on your page with a new link to BlogDex referencing your original link.  BlogDex then shows you other pages it knows about that use the same link.  Clever.

I've made one modification to the Meta Linker script to fit better with how I want it to work.  Although they provide the ability to restrict Meta Linker to a specific section I wanted it to work only on the body text of each posting.  This required a little work and learning about DOM on my part.

You can find my modified script here and see the results on this page. 

What do you think of Meta Linker?

 

Is this old news?  I only found out about it at the weekend.  If you don't already have the GoogleBar for IE go get it now!

 

A first go at a definition:

BlogPlex - a dynamic focal point for a weblogging community.

 

Should your blog be part of a ring?