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.

G Lists and ad hoc groups

John Tropea has a couple of posts that echo one of my last posts about ad hoc groups, and I think he’s right when he says OPML is the vehicle to achieve this.

He says:

Now what I say is why do we have to go to MyBlogLog to see all this when the Recent Reader widget could be an annotated Grazr widget, like Twazr.

I’ll go one better I think. Why do you even need to go to your own site? Why not a dynamic feed in your reader? Or better yet, both.

And,

Further to this a Grazing List is an ever changing list of feeds, and this is what the MyBlogLog Recent Readers widget is, a perpetual changing list of people/blogs based on these people/blogs visiting your blog site

Yup, and why not a dynamic feed based upon conversations you are in as well? Every RSS item is open and two-way, to whatever extent you wish. Comments are dead.

Lastly, he is frustrated about these services not working together and accepting the de facto standard for reading lists, OPML,

can’t I just plug in this OPML into a service, just like SYO.

I hear ya. IF we can make some progess on Identity and the use of XRI for discoverable services about oneself, I don’t think you or I should even have to upload our OPML. Just keep one file up to date and all sorts of services can use it.

Voila!, ad hoc groups based upon your Glists (Grazing Lists, Reading Lists, Listening Lists, Viewing Lists)

Ad Hoc groups are key to media dying

Kent Newsome and Tom Morris both opine about how Techmeme and Techcrunch have become less satisfying than going directly to the sources themselves.

Well, yes those sites have become media themselves and we all know that media is dead.

I like Kent’s idea that the Techmeme algorithm is actually working so well that it’s exposing a Web 2.0 flaw:

Maybe the Techmeme algorithm has deduced that all of this Web 2.0 stuff is really just the media business in some new form. If you have no product to sell, what are you? If your primary or only revenue source is the sale of ads, what are you? You’re not science. You’re not a seller of goods. You’re media. You’re the new TV. A million pages of user generated content broadcasting your AdSense banner over the new air.

I also have to give Kent a hand for referencing Mike Brady. It’s an interesting reference since that popular show was about ten years past the era when it should have succeeded. That type of humor should never have been popular by the late sixties and early seventies, yet it was.

Likewise, mediation should be dead, but it’s alive and well at these sites. Why is this?

Well, I still don’t think we have the tools to manage our own information consumption. Lots of people have been talking about them, but not too many delivering.

Tom is right when he says:

If you are in the media business, you need to fully grok the consequences of AdBlock and BitTorrent. You don’t have to like the consequences, but I imagine most of you haven’t even understood the full consequences of a system whereby anyone can share anything with anyone else without seeing any adverts in the process.

The only problem is we still need a whole new generation of software to help us manage and find information that we like.

A major part of that new software or services is social. For now we have just come to rely on a few bloggers that we trust, but this means we get a lot of junk and miss some important stuff too.

I think applying VRM to news and information will help produce some new tools that gcan deliver the information we need when and how we want it.

Also, I’m still thinking that ad hoc group creation, moderation and subscription will also revolutionize blogging in such a way that that we can slip in and out of conversations, file sharing, and marketplaces fluidly and instantly.
A kind of Share Your OPML writ large.

Identity is the first step toward that end, and then a spec to allow adhocracies to form. It’s not so difficult and SSE might play a role.

There has to be a simple way for people to form groups, and a relatively simple way to develop web applications that use this power.

Until then, we rely on trusted people and services, and some of these become like old media themselves even if spun in a new way.

Are Blog Trees the next gen discussion groups?

Yahoo sent this out to Yahoo Groups users:

Dear Yahoo! Groups User:

Starting March 26, 2007, you’ll notice a few changes when you log into
your Group.

- In the past we have allowed group owners to customize their home
pages using IFrames (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IFRAME). In order
to better protect our users against online threats (learn more about
online threats here: http://security.yahoo.com/), we can no longer
support IFrames. If you currently use IFrames to display another web
page on your group’s home page, it will no longer appear. See the
Yahoo! Groups Team blog (http://blog.360.yahoo.com/y_groups_team) to
learn what HTML tags are allowed to help personalize your group
description.

- The Yahoo! Answers module will be turned on by default on all
groups. This change will happen over several days, so you may not see
the module right away.

You may recall that we originally introduced the Answers module last
year to offer groups another source of useful information. In
response to your feedback, we have been working with the Answers team
to ensure greater relevance and quality of results that appear in the
module, to the point where we now believe it makes sense to default
the module back on. We’ve put a lot of effort into mapping each group
to a relevant topic on Answers. However, as a moderator, if you don’t
think the module is appropriate for your particular group(s), you
continue to have the option to change the content of what’s displayed
in the module or to switch the module off completely.

- We have increased spam protection for group owner email
(groupname-owner@yahoogroups.com) addresses.

Some of you are already aware of an improvement that became available
last month, but it bears repeating.

- By popular demand we increased file and photo storage limits to 100
megs each. You told us that the old limits weren’t enough, and we want
to let you know we heard you loud and clear!

As always, you’ll find more information about these latest Groups
changes and other Groups news on the Groups Team Blog:
http://blog.360.yahoo.com/y_groups_team

The Yahoo! Groups Team

No big deal, but in an age of letting the user have what they want, it seems that they are constraining and controlling.

Perhaps the time is ripe for the next generation of discussion groups. Something along the lines of Blog Trees.

I’ve got more to post on this. Very soon.

The Google ReWriter and SSE

James Corbett asks where the integrated read/write web tool is, and claims Google Reader will morph into it.

He also claims comments are dead this year. I don’t like them either but I think that’s aggressive.

James, if you and Tom Morris want to eliminate comments, I think we could do it with SSE, like I showed at OPML camp.

We are blogging on three distinct platforms (Wordpress, Typepad, OPML community) so it would be a great start if we could get it to work between the three of us. Then we can widgetize it with Grazr ; ).

The Golden Fleece

I’m hoping part two of the latest Gillmor Gang will prove more interesting.

If you remember the Jason and the Argonauts tale, you might know how Jason succeeded in conquest over the Seed men by casting a stone at one, who thought it was his neighbor, and letting them all kill each other.

That’s what Steve Gillmor seems to do by letting the fellas discuss the importance of Google algorithms and whether site owners can get a cut by having search engines bid for their site search.

If Steve would have put the “knockoff” Cheerios down for a sec I know what he would have said.

It’s not whether Google’s algorithms hold up, it’s whether they can garner more stock in the conversation with all their attention data.

The winners of the future are not the best technologies. We’ll all be able to plug into those the same way we plug into an electrical outlet.

The winners are the services which add value to the conversations happening throughout distributed web networks.

These networks and conversations are fluid and changing constantly in response to our gestures.

Those who don’t get this are either thinking too hard or just not enough.

In a similar way that facial and hand gestures are a meaningful supplement to spoken conversations, the gestures which we talk about with attention are the metadata of the conversations happening on the web.

That equates to economic power because markets are conversations.

I agree with Jason Calacanis that many in the SEO business are trying to game this system, but I disagree when he says the system works. People are trying to game the system because it does not work. It just works better than the previous systems.

I can prove it Jason. I’ll write a better piece on a new cell phone than Engadget and see which shows up higher on Google.

No. Those dynamics are only part of the game.

The richer system envelops us with answers using our data and our network’s data in a chameleon like fashion, never static like Google. That’s child’s play.

Jason(Argonaut) succeeded in getting the Golden Fleece but was fickle and left Medea for another Princess.

Likewise, in the shorter term companies may succeed by amassing link attention.

The true winners won’t be seeking the Golden Fleece at all. They will be removing the barriers and letting the crystal waters flow in, filtered and clean, Pure Conversation.

OPML Camp a huge success

So, Im back from RSS Alley and OPML Camp today.

I did not blog from the conference simply because the conversations were so rich and thought provoking that I didn’t want to only give them partial attention.

Attention itself was in fact a big topic and there is some big news coming our way on that topic. Other topics included namespaces, the spec, RDF and tags. Oh and Second Life seemed to permeate the breaks. I even talked a little on SSE, and I think we might see some progess on SSE used with OPML soon.

Special thanks must go to Adam Green, who did a great job organizing and Berkman for hosting, and Halley Suitt and the Top Ten Sources folks for hosting the party.

And if Dave Winer is listening, we all thanked you for RSS and OPML in general. Great work.

The whole weekend was truly inspirational.

But speaking of conversations and attention, this one is nearly over for me.
Perhaps a couple transitional posts and I’ll be moving on.

A couple things are for sure. OPML and Reading Lists (Glists if you ask me, Beeds if you ask James Corbett) have a huge future. Attention and gestures have a huge future. Grazr has a huge future and Second Life-like environments have a huge future. I’d like to be in the middle of it all.

Or I could just hang out on the podcast.com platform(search for podcast in second life) and listen to streaming music.

Either way.

IE7 feed reading view is “forced control”

OPML grazrs look out!
Well, I know most probably don’t work with XSL but I wanted to get your attention.
This latest post from the Microsoft Team RSS Blog explains how feed reading view will work in IE7 and gives guidelines for mime-types to use for RSS feeds.
I’ve brought this up before, and here is why I don’t like it.
One of the coolest and under-utilized things about delivering xml to the browser was the ability to add a stylesheet transformation to the document.
And it worked pretty well with Firefox and IE.
Now I can’t accompany an RSS feed with an xsl stylesheet and have the browser IE render it on the fly. It goes directly into feed reading view.
It doesn’t seem unreasonable or technically difficult to check for a stylesheet and use it if it is present, and only go into feed reading view if it is an RSS feed AND no stylesheet is present.
Considering how much contribution Microsoft is making with SSE and SLE and RSS for other types of applications in general, this seems to counter that thinking, by assuming the party serving the feed has only one use in mind.
I hope they don’t do this for OPML! We want to create rich browsable applications with it, right guys?

Open Source memetracker (or better)

If you don’t feel like clicking ,
Stowe Boyd
Alex Barnett
Robert Scoble
Ken Yarmosh

I’ll let you know that all these posts are about dissatisfaction with memetrackers. That’s just a sample of a growing feeling.
You can just as easily put together a list about the attention problem caused by generic feedreaders.

I could pontificate today about possible solutions, but instead I think I’ll take some action. I’ve been looking for a project. This seems to be the one.

I’m launching an open-source memetracker at http://glistn.com , but it’s going to heavily integrate reading lists (glists) and just approach the whole problem differently. In fact, I mean it to be something more than that. I want it to be a metacommunity. More on that later.

Since it will be open source, you’ll be able to know exactly how the filtering takes place and scream if you don’t like it.

If you want to be notified when it goes live, you can sign up at the site and also subscribe to the blog.

If you’d like to take a larger role (perhaps advisory or hacker), just contact me at matt {at glistn dot com}

The metacommunity concept as a framework for OPML based communities (part 2)

(part 1 is here)
First, let’s address why we need communities smaller than the blogosphere istelf.
As the number of use cases that can be made for blogs continues to grow with initiatives like structured blogging, microformats, SSE and the recent web clipboard, will this necessitate a change with the way we interact with the blogosphere?
In other words, will it become more common for blog readers to only want a subset of a particluar blog’s feed?
If blog use becomes what startups like Edgeio seem to be implying, then the answer is probably yes.
Consider an example where a particular blog routinely posts about tech, family, cooking recipes and also sells hand made products.
You may only be interested in the tech post and not the recipes.
Tags help, but are both ambiguous and impractical.
Collective intelligence in tagging and bookmarking can help.
We often need a tighter loop with less noise and more signal.
This notion is prompted by Scoble and Winer saying the blogosphere is adopting some of the negative usenet and mail list traits.
By it’s virtue of being so open, it will necessarily grow in noise, much of which could be created by good citizens using the system for structured blogging.
We can’t expect everyone to maintain a blog for every topic they wish to contribute to, so we either need to filter in a very sophisticated manner, or evolve into complex, segmented metacommunities.
It seems to me that reading lists can play a big role in creating metacommunities, acting like a topic-based buddy list.
In this way, we can direct some posts toward actual communities, even if they are still available to the greater system.
And once we have an open standard for explicitly replying to a post, rather than implicitly assuming such from a link, tightly bound, threaded conversations can co-exist with the general posts that are common-place today.
(end part 2)