webschuur.com

We have RSS to follow posts. And more advanced systems have ways to track followups over RSS too.

But so far there seem to be no ways to actually stay informed. To integrate both, and to get the real value, to get the ‘whats happening’ for “things”. Most of all we should be able to follow updates and comments on sites. This -again- is not the same as subscribing to an RSS feed for a certain post. It is about tracking the discussion, the original posts, the discussions that spin-off on peoples own sites and the comments on certain, undefined, posts. Often a comment makes an origninal post gain its actual value. Often a followup on someone else’s blog or website gets a real momentum going.

Blogs. Conversation. Not exactly two words that people would fit in one sentence. Blogs don’t talk to eachother; maybe with some trackback system, or via technorati, but even then they don’t really conversate.

Wilfred Rubens pointed me to a very good post on this matter.

Dave Pollard investigated the very nature of a conversation, looked at how this applies to online communities and explains very clearly how blogs can improve the actual conversation, both within the weblogs and within their blogosphere.

2006 was all about two-dot-oh. Whatever that may be precisely, everyone agrees about the fact its all about ‘collaboration’. Collaboration is cool, it is productive and it is easy. You don’t need to think about where to stick your tags, because gazillion others already did that: delicious. You can not just look at images, you can tag, annotate, share and so forth them: flickr. You don’t need to browse all these stupid skipintro sites to find gigs or artist info: last.fm.

But all this has one mayor downside. What happens, for example when web2.0 goes down? What happens when web2.0 is sold without too much considerations for you? Or when it eats all your hours of data-sifting, all your hard work, just to make some more bucks? In all these cases, you’re basically fsked. If Yahoo! decides they can make more bucks by closing you out from your gigabytes/years of flickr data, bad luck for you. And what about the weeks you spent fiddling with premiere to get that 5 minute video for youtube finshed, only to find out that you are no longer the real owner?

I see a great opportunity for Drupal. Decentralisation. Distribution. P2P communication between webapplications. To Take Back The Web2.0.

Taxonomy and freetagging as the spine of the site

I just finished the first phase of Kaisu.org. A site alike Nowpublic, in the sense that it allows you to make the news. The main difference is the angle to look at the news. KaiSu looks at the news from a ‘regional’ angle; allowing to look for local news near you.

Main features the client asked for were:

• a clear mechanism to “write to places”. You write news, or upload photo’s ad add them to a region.
• a way to allow adoption of a region.

This page lists the features that are required to have a state-of-the-art drupal based weblog. Assumed is, that you want a personal weblog with some images, and occasionally a file.

First you need to make the choise how you are going to create your weblog entries. Some wish to have full power over each page they make. For them I suggest: leave drupal, and get dreamweaver or frontpage. Other want some power, for example where to place images, where to add style, html and other data, in each post. The best practive, however, is to think of a strict layout for each page, and dont allow any difference. If you think about this layout well, you will find that you need no power over your pages at all.