Category: Blogging

DJ Adams has created a distributed book club application that “finds if anyone has been talking about any of your favourite or current books”, by crawling AllConsuming.net. This creates an RSS file, “which represents a sort of ‘commentary alert’ feed for that user and his books.”
From the “to do list” in DJ’s code:
Would be nice to be able to retrieve:
1) user book list for *all* book types (completed, purchased, etc)
2) book *comments* (recorded in allconsuming) as well as blog mentions
This is wonderful! This is one of the things that I started blogging for.
via Euan Semple

I’m travelling (New York and New Jersey), with spotty internet access through Sunday.
Forecast: light blogging.

Phillip Pearson just posted the first version of the Internet Topic Exchange, a very cool service that enables the creation of composite blogs out of trackback pings.
A few weeks ago, Chip suggested creating a composite Austin blog to cover Austin politics, following the Peterme conversation on city blogs. We could cover other topics in addition to politics — music, restaurants, etc.
There’s already an AustinBloggers site, which has several authors. But that requires individuals to post directly to that blog. This is a different idea — post to your very own blog, and the AustinBlog will aggregate your Austin-related posts.
I created a demo site, here which has some of my Austin posts from recent months.
All we need to do to post to the blog would be to add this trackback to the posts on our own blogs about Austin. http://topicexchange.com/t/austin_blog/
The resulting content will be available as an RSS feed, which we could pull into a standalone MovableType-based blog (for example, and if I get the RSS plug-in working correctly). This could be formatted more nicely than the native wiki format.
People who don’t use trackback can enter their URL in a web form here or use the MT trackback server (not sure how that works yet.)
I’m travelling this week, so I can’t work on a standalone aggregate blog until next week.
I sent an email to everyone I remember participating in the AustinBlog conversation over the last few weeks. Others are welcome to to the party.

iCommune is a program that lets iTunes users share songs over the internet. (via Euan Semple
Which is very nifty — as long as both people have iTunes.
Meanwhile, Marc Canter argues in favor of universal broadband content standards. He argues gamefully about the benefits to:
* On-line media storage systems
* Media management systems
* Media tools, devices and playback systems
* Online communities
But each of these players has more interest in proprietary models than common standards.
It will take some sort of mass decentralized application (like blogging) to drive standards againsts the interest of the existing vendors

The topic-based model (RidiculouslyEasyGroupForming and the BlogThreading models have different strengths and weaknesses.
They are both good, they aren’t the same.
Topics are great for aggregate blogs that assemble posts about coffee shops, Austin events, or other specific subject.
Threadneedle is better for aggregating a human conversation, whose topic meanders under a named thread.
A topic-focused blog won’t get you a human conversation (that would be ai-complete). A human conversation won’t get you a subject-organized index (not without editing after the fact).
– Adina
p.s. Shelley writes a good summary of her progress and other developments in BlogConversation tools here.

There’s great discussion going on here about creating weblog aggregated from individual bloggers’ categorized posts.
This would be a fun way to create an Austin blog out of the various AustinBlogger posts that talk about local events and places.
And a conversation about Shelley Powers ThreadNeedle application, which will create threaded discussions out of trackback threads (if I understand it right).
Which we could use to create a single threaded discussion out of the distributed conversation about geoURL applications.
I’m still reading up on the conversation, please correct me if I’ve summarized wrong.

Ross Mayfield has a good summary of a discussion about cognitive and emotional dimensions of trust.
As I said in the comments to that post, I like the notions that:
* trust is built over time
* trust is a parametric space, with different kinds of trust (personal trust that a friend will be reliable and sympathetic; professional trust that a colleague will produce quality work).
But I start getting suspicious about social science methodologies that attempt to quantify and parameterize trust. Organizations that rely heavily on this kind of analysis in Professor Stephenson’s work may have more problems than a consulting sociologist can help with.
My first market research job involved writing up the results of HR surveys in a large telecommunications company.
The results showed that employees did not trust managers and managers did not trust employees. The HR survey was repeated on an annual basis, showing that managers and employees continued to distrust each other.
This company had big problems with management and human relationships. Spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on survey research to quantify the distrust between managers and employees wasn’t the best use of money.
Pages full of survey results and armies of consultants don’t replace and can’t create honest leadership, aligned incentives, and day-to-day warmth and respect.

Trying to add the “email this entry feature.” Please ignore strange behavior you may see while I futz.

We could use GeoURLS to create the Global Coffeeshop blog.
Mark-up blog entries with the GeoURL for the coffeeshop. Then be able to look up coffee-shops in any part of the world.

cool idea. Nasty, closed implementation — a proprietary service from the phone company to create blogs only from its own customers, vs. software and an open API to blog pictures.
That kind of openness probably isn’t possible in the closed cellphone world. Wonder what Russ Beattie thinks about it, as a mobile guy and blogger.
via Dave Winer.