OK - so we start off with Scott Rosenberg grokking Dave Winer's new Scripting News..... (I pick on this below....)
Multi-dimensional blogging
[This post was written on Friday but some glitch stopped it from actually posting when I thought it was posted, so here it is, only slightly yellowed with age:]
It's taken me a little while to figure out what Dave Winer has been up to this past week with his redesign of Scripting News, the site that taught so many of us how versatile the blog form could be. I think I get it now.
A lot of the comments he's elicited have focused on the outre Amsterdam red-light-district photo that has replaced his time-honored cactus. But that's just, as it were, the window-dressing. (As of now, Monday, that picture is already gone -- I guess that image will change periodically, which is a nice touch.)
At first it seemed like Winer was just adding a bunch of categories to his blog. And hey, that didn't seem so revolutionary -- Radio Userland, Movable Type and lots of blogging tools already allow that.
But the changes now feel more ambitious than that. Dave is placing each of his blog posts into a hierarchical outline or directory. (This shouldn't be a big surprise -- Winer's signature software product was an outliner.)
So, basically, with this new approach, each new post to his blog is now being fed into two alternative navigation systems: the chronological mode blogs all share ("Find post by date") and a new outline/directory mode that seems new to the blog world (though obviously it's omnipresent on the Web). In other words, every blog post is now contributing not only to a diary-like timeline but also to a Yahoo-like knowledge base.
I imagine there are other things going on here beneath the surface, but this alone seems pretty neat to me.
[Scott Rosenberg's Links & Comment]
Hey Scott - I thought I'd turn you on to a couple of related sites out there - that are doing things like what Dave is doing.
1. Phil Pearson's TopicExchange.com. Go to this public site. Define channel/topic of interest (I choose TheMatrix.) Subscribe to any channel you wish (via RSS of course.) Folks can contirbute to channels via Trackback or by manually posting to that channel. As far as I know the TopicExchange was the first blog aggregation channel play.
Some folks use the TopicExchange for conferences or seminars or for special events or emergency situations. Others have copied the concept of blog aggregation channels - in general - for other uses.
2. Then there's eVector's W4/k-collector new service. It's based upon a paralell concept of topics - which are used to aggregate blog posts. But it goes about it a completely different way. Folks utilize a 'k-collector' plug-in in their blog tool to attach keywords to their blog posts. Then a new kind of aggregator - called W4 (for Who, What, Where, When) is used to browse, sort and display these posts - via topic keywords, instead of.... well you get the point, basically that's what Dave Winer is doing today.
But the difference is that W4/k-collector utilzies shared clouds - so that MULTIPLE people are contributing these keywords. The TopicExchange uses an open approach as well. And (surprise, surpirse) Paolo (of eVectors) has been working on a way on connecting these worlds together.
There is also the issue of 'topic mapping' to keep in mind - as well. Afterall one man's musical event is another man's concert.
But - my dear friend Scott - what this is ALL about is knowledge management coming to the blogosphere. These are unhderlying themes of teh semantic web. This is about agents, and smart software and ne wkinds of tools to enable all this new stuff.
In other words - when Dave Winer discovers this shit - that means it's VERY real, it's been here a while and it ain't going away.
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