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.

Identifiers as a platform

Drummond Reed collects some thoughts leading to (well, he says it best):

.
With XRI 2.1 and the XDI RDF model, about which I’ll start blogging much more extensively after IIW, that’s what we’ll have laid the foundation for. A semantic web where the semantics are actually in the identfiers.

Excelllent. XRI or OpenID could be used to identity resources of all kinds without even the need to access those resources beforehand. Whole services could be built on top of identifiers alone.

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)

Prediction: XRI will be as big as RSS

For those of you looking for good podcast and interested in new frontiers on the web, there is an excellent IT Conversations from Phil Windley speaking with Drummond Reed on XRI and Identity.

I’ve been watching the VRM space get some legs for a little while now, and this podcast really gave me some great understanding of the identity space and fueled some pretty neat ideas. I’ve got VRM religion!

I firmly believe that XRI will revolutionize how web apps are built, and even how we eventually view the web. I’m already redesigning the architecture of a few of my projects, in anticipation of the huge change that is before us over the next few years.

Quote me:

I think XRI will be as significant as RSS.

Much more blogging to come on this subject.

=matthew (listen to the podcast if you don’t get this signature)

UPDATE: On a side note, I entered blogging late because the first descriptions (from traditional media) of it explained it as a way for non-technical people to update websites. True, but when I realized it was really about conversations, I saw the light.
Similarly, when identity was poised as “a way to sign on to different sites with the same credentials,” I thought it was neat, but now I realize that is only the tip of the iceberg.
It’s really about redistributing control, to the identity. That’s why VRM and identity mesh so well together.

UPDATE 2: Since this blog is predicated on silos of social interaction melting down from a web page based point of control to an individual or “buddy list” basis for social networks, I now adapt my original thesis which claims, as Stowe Boyd might say, “the buddy list is the center of the universe,” to a new crede; “identity is the center of my universe.”
What I mean to say is that once identity is firmly established, the social network, or what I like to think of as the “adhocracy,” will develop in a distributed manner. What, in cluetrain fashion, will inevitably result is “pure conversation.” And all economics will be subject to that and only that.

UPDATE 3:After re-reading what I just wrote, I think I’ll keep the picture of me with a beard on the blog, despite my wife and Greg Narain’s objections. You just can’t seriously talk about distributed control of economics and conversations without some facial hair.