March 31, 2005

Content Abuse

Andy reluctantly exposed a massive amount of search engine spam hosted by Wordpress. He saved a copy of the results before Google removed them.

November 19, 2004

Re: Conversation Category

James Tauber, Don Park, and Dave Winer are discussing how to tag blog-to-blog conversations. The idea is that blog entries for a particular conversation are assigned an agreed-upon category and that a conversation aggregator is used to moderate the conversation.

To add my own two cents to this thread, conversation aggregators (as well as the participating blogs) should make use of "reply on my blog" links.

Also, on naming the conversation: When replying to blog entries which are not yet designated as being part of a thread, an identifier is generated, perhaps inviting responses from a list of fellow travellers. This identifier could be based on the entry, or selected through a dialog which would assist the blogger in forming a Google-unique word combination.

It warms my heart that ideas for blog-to-blog conversations can be improved upon in the context of a raging RSS vs. Atom debate :)

April 29, 2004

Trackback == Annotation

James Tauber has written up an approach to blog conversations, which he intends to implement in Leonardo. He referenced Danny Ayers' interesting post about blog entries as web annotation.

I had already considered POSTing to the blog entry as the mechanism for comments and that is when it first struck me that comments and trackbacks are really the same thing. The fields that you POST would be slightly different, but the mechanism should be the same. Source.

(Technorati Ref, Topic Exchange Ref)

April 22, 2004

TalkBack: Reply on My Blog

RE:
How to Make Blogging More SemWeb Friendly,
RSS Conversations,
Topics in Weblogs,
Threads of Conversation.

This particular fork got started here.

Blog-to-blog conversations are easily fragmented, with responses residing on blog discussion boards, the responder's site, and on various tracking services.

I have been thinking about how to implement a "reply on my blog" link which would enable a writer to reply using his own CMS.

Implemented with current web technology, this idea assumes that the API of the responder's blogging software can be known to the site which he is responding to. This reply would link to a script on the original site, which, after noting the action, would redirect the request to the content management system under the responder's control.

RDF for the original entry (and historical data about the conversation) would be passed to the responder's CMS in the url string. He would respond. As his CMS updates his blog, his response would be forwarded on to the cited blog (which would be expecting it), trackers, aggregators, and online communities.

Additional concepts:

• the responder would be provided with a standard blog posting page, perhaps with: a listing of links in the original post, metadata about the discussion, information about the participants, a way to view the conversation tree, etc.
  
• any metadata (such as dc:Subject and the tracking service of choice) assigned to the entry by the original blogger could carry over to the responder, who could add additional metadata. But how much metadata should accumulate?
  
• the effort to implement something like "reply on my site" would add to the culture of interoperability between sites (as TrackBack did)
  
• threading, summarization, and other forms of conversational analysis could be performed by any interested party, provided that the RDF can be obtained from each participating site
  
• organized conversation forking could be supported
  

Conversations Via Technorati

Simon Phipp has written a short analysis about the use of Technorati to track blog conversations. Several blog leaders including BoingBoing and Tim Bray have adopted this approach, using a visual bubble or html link to identify the conversation site or topic.

April 21, 2004

Organizing the Blogosphere

Seb Paquet has posted some interesting ideas about self-organizing blog directories. He cooks up a distributed solution in which GeoURLish "badges" would visibly (and semantically) designate a blogger as a member of a particular academic community.

I definitely like the badge idea. The badge should link to a local RDF file designating community afiliation, with additional data appertaining to that affiliation. Categorization schemes on the part of search engines have loosened the dependency on directories, and self-categorization is becoming the norm as web developers get accustomed to the process of generating RSS and other metadata.

Community centers, blog planets, and leading bloggers will be the primary driving force in popularizing these badges, and in organizing the category sets used in the population of blog directories. I think that developing tools for these sites to create badges and organize the harvesting of participant data is more important than tools for the blogs themselves. Early adopters will simply copy and manually modify the RDF of the leaders as it happened with FOAF.

Mr. Paquet also set up a wiki page and a TE channel to track this conversation.

April 19, 2004

RSS Conversations

Reacting to Nico Macdonald's article about the future of blogging, Roland Tanglao describes how PubSub tracks RSS conversations using citation titles and urls.

Analyzing meaningful conventions such as "by way of", "has posted", "about", and "responded to" can go a long way toward bringing meaning to RSS content (without troubling writers with new markup or additional steps in the process).

The Future of Blogging

Ahead of BloggerCon II, Nico Macdonald wrote an interesting article for The Register in which he discussed blog journalism and speculated on future developments in the blogosphere. Considering the recent discussions about RSS catgegorization, blog-to-blog conversations, and using DMOZ, this struck me:

We also need to find ways to categorise posts ? to bring the kind of structure that Yahoo! brought to information on the Web ? and the seeds of this concept can be seen in Moveable Type, NewsMonster and other tools. We also need to find ways of assigning priority to posts based on who wrote them (an approach often referred to as reputation management) and where they were posted. Source.

March 25, 2004

The Center for Citizens' Media

Jeff Jarvis has announced that he is working on a Center for Citizens' Media, and is hoping to have NYU involved.

March 23, 2004

The FAQs About TypeKey

Six Apart has posted the anticipated FAQ for their upcoming TypeKey authentication service. It looks like there will be many different ways for a web site to make use of TypeKey, or to use an alternative of their own making. Cool!

March 20, 2004

Dave Winer's Questions for SixApart

Six Apart's announcement about TypeKey is generating some heat - and questions from Dave Winer. By way of a post by Snappy the Clam:

3. Will it be possible for Movable Type and TypePad users to plug into a non-SixApart authentication system?

4. Will the process for designing the API be open or will it be designed exclusively by SixApart? Source

My position on this matter is that centralized user authentication is likely to be run as a business operation, and a service such as TypeKey ultimately helps smaller services compete with agglomerated services such as Yahoo and Google.

It would be ideal for the social software community if SixApart were to create an open, federated system which allows others to maintain alternatives. If they don't, well, we can always work more on an open alternative (there are several out there).

TypeKey: Centralized User Authentication

Six Apart has posted information about their upcoming TypeKey privacy-protected authentication service. TypeKey is clearly a critical aspect of Movable Type 3.0 and Six Apart will be allowing other web sites and services to participate. In time, this web service could evolve into a practical alternative to Microsoft Passport.

TypeKey is a free, open system providing a central identity that anyone can use to log in and post comments on blogs and other web sites. Source