Newspaper site reformation 1.1

Okay. I’m pretty sure I’m going to build a new system to act as the CMS of the new newspaper sites.
Since I’m doing so, I may as well choose the technologies that I feel most confident with.
In this case the web pages will be built with PHP and Apache, and the database will be Postgresql. These will all run on FreeBSD.

Why build instead of using Drupal or Joomla? It is a tough call, but I have yet to see a CMS that isn’t story centric, or even more importantly, “site centric.”

Yes, you can achieve a great degree of “community” with a lot of CMS’s out there, especially with a blogging platform like Wordpress, which I seriously considered for many good reasons.

But the future, IMHO, is in distributed systems, and I don’t see anything that is built specifically with that in mind.

I’m basing the system on RSS 2.0 and all of the data that will be treated as atomic units, whether it was created by a staff reporter or photographer, a site visitor, or it comes from another system or site entirely.

If it sounds like an aggregator, well it is, but it’s a very smart aggregator, because I don’t mean to suggest that we won’t be displaying our original content with some prominence. But that’s just one view of the content. OPML will be the skeletal structure that suports the multiple views. We may even try to implement checkbox news. ; )

You see, it’s based upon a feed-centric view of items, so if the feed is from the editorial department and has a category of sports, we know what it is.

If the feed is from elsewhere, we know what it is.

Ultimately this is based upon a web-centric view of things, not a company-centric.

Also of note, is the idea of groups, or groupings, as Stowe Boyd might more aptly describe them. AdHocracies, is the way I’ve put it in the past. Stowe hinted at this some time back with his blog trees idea.

The concept here is that a feed, or a blog and its items are a thread of expanding contributions. I’ll be using SSE to help that along. Two-way news is something I’ve been ineterested in for a while, but have yet to hammer down.

Greg Narain told me (at Ajax World) that it was too complicated and I agree that is an issue.

The only way this can work is if it’s transparent to the people using it. It’s just got to make sense from a user interface perspective right off the bat, or it won’t fly.

I know. Good luck.

A lot of this decision was based upon the ideas that the projectvrm folks have been throwing around lately. In addition to a distributed approach to the content, we’ll be supporting OpenID and other distributed identity ideas like XRI/inames. (like =matthew)

Lastly, along the same lines as VRM, is the idea of user attention data, but It’s way too early to tell in what ways we can make that useful. But i think we will.

Ajax World Day 2

Steve Rubel just gave a nice talk called the me2revolution, about widgets, ajax and syndication. In other words, how to get your content or message out to where the users are, since he gives the page-view about three years before it’s dead as a meaningful metric. Couldn’t agree more.

I tried to get him to say pay-per-action mght be the future, but he still belives in ad-based content, though he seemed warmer to sponsorships.

Also, I knew he couldn’t get through the talk without a mention of Twitter. His point there was about news feeds that people are creating for Twitter, like Dave Winer’s NYTimes feed. If you don’t create it or at least enable it, others will, so there is no place for not being aware of these technologies.

It was a tough call between Steve’s talk and Adam Sah’s Google Gadgets.

Earlier, Bret Taylor of Google spoke about the challenges of Ajax. He concluded that despite all the negative aspects, it is and will be the way developers create web applications going forward. he also highlighted somenice toolkits for creating ajax applications, and of course Google Web Toolkit was on top of the list. It did look interesting though.

Next up, Google is doing a demo, and then Gregory Narain looks to be taking Stowe Boyd’s place to talk about Social Applications.

A few of the other bits of talks I’ve seen have been a bit about marketing Ajax as a whole, but if you’re here, I can’t imagine you need to be convinced of that.

Looking forward to Andi Gutmans on PHP and Ajax.

Tom Morris says buy a book and forget the conference.