Sunday, October 05, 2003

Massively Scalable Blog Community Server? I suspect this idea occurred to many of us at the same time (and probably many others a long time ago) during the "Weblogs in Presidential Politics" segment of BloggerCon 2003. It came up as Mathew Gross from the Dean Campaign Blog was bemoaning the effort it took to ensure that their server stayed up 24x7, the double edged sword of trying to build a massive community of bloggers and blog readers around the Dean Campaign. As a blog enthusiast and someone with a commercial software background, my mind habitually is looking for the cool commercial product opportunity, and which led met to jotting down some notes on this "Massively Scalable Blog Community Service." It would have to: Support millions of blogs and tens of millions of readers Be suitable for both a public (open) semi-closed ("extranet") or closed (internal) blog Include a dialable set of editorial tools to allow a customer to have the appropriate degree of editorial control and approval Because of the scale it would also include a hierachical system of moderation including peer-moderation. Be totally self-service, requiring no client software installation; it would be totally cross platform. Be standards compliant to allow full interoperability with the rest of the blog software world (i.e. linking, trackback, commenting, syndication, etc.) [update: As the comment indicates, there are lots of existing blog server systems out there; I haven't looked at them and was not suggesting that no-one has or has not built this kind of system. I will be looking into that. But by the way, what happened to MicroContent News? Looks like it was interesting but has been totally inactive.] 12:31:54 AM  >  trackback []   comment []