stoweboyd
Over the weekend I threw together @locals, a twitter app that creates groups based upon the location setting in your Twitter profile.
Just do a twitter reply to @locals.
Traffic has been slow at http://atlocals.com but it’s been well worth it to watch the posts from around the world.
Stowe Boyd came up with the idea of virtual locations like “Not LeWeb3″ and a few have followed suit.
This one is posting from “Hell.”
You’d think that group would be a little more active. (I was going to say hotter, but you would think I planned that joke)
Dec 12 2007 09:19 pm |
twitter and
stoweboyd |
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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.
Reply to Stowe Boyd :
Maybe the Technorati company or brand isn’t for sale, but the data is. Since, as Stowe says, the service needs to be re-architectured, maybe someone just wants the data so they can build there own version.
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.
Mar 26 2007 06:39 pm |
SSE and
kosso and
stoweboyd |
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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.
Great quote form Stowe Boyd on the dying press release:
The argument that the press release is the right mechanism to transmit important information to the world because it works so well for newspapers, is something like saying that oats are what we should put into the gas tanks of cars because it works so well for horses.
I used to go nuts when clueless folks called site visitors “viewers” instead of “users”.
My point was that if all they are doing is viewing and not interacting, then our product needs to get a little better.
Well, the times have changed and now I agree with Stowe Boyd on the term “User Generated Content” .
He’s got it right. We are all here and the world is flat. So any term that implies a publisher->reader or site->user type of relationship is headed for trouble.
As Stowe says, we are now all participants.
He says we are participants in Participatory Media, but I’m even against the word media.
Media can be disintermediated while participants in a conversation really can’t.
Now I’m fully aware that the term media can be used to mean film, tape and digital rather than Media Companies. But the reason why we call them media companies is because media is the plural of medium.
The web is the first mass distribution medium that isn’t scarce in it’s allocation, either through economics or scarcity of availability, like limited TV frequencies (channels)
By it’s very nature, then, it is qualitatively different from anything else we have ever called media.
But I’m not here to argue semantics.
I only know too well from first-hand experience that many “media” companies still see User Generated Content as some lower form of media species.
Their attempts to exploit it will be as successful as chasing a lizard’s long tail.
UGC = Unsuccessful Grasp for Control.
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.
Stowe Boyd points out that XP can boot on a Mac.
Interesting, but isn’t everyone really waiting for Mac OS X to boot on commodity PC Hardware?
Who would you pay for Mac hardware and run Windows, to see if the XP can freeze up that hardware too?
Mar 29 2006 06:55 pm |
apple and
microsoft and
stoweboyd and
xp |
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