OPML
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.
Over the coming weeks, I’ll be rebuilding some newspaper sites.
If you are weak in the knees, don’t click through, because it’s pretty bad.
http://www.thehour.com
http://www.thestamfordtimes.com
http://www.wiltonvillager.com
Tomorrow, we have our first meeting and I’ve decided to take the rest of you along.
It should be fun.
Subscriber vs. Free. . .
full text feeds vs. partial. . .
traditional journalism vs. community and blogging. . .
display ads vs. collecting detailed attention and gesture data with which to empower users to control their vendor relations. . .
(well, you know)
stay tuned
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)
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.
I have officially accepted a position of Web Development Director with The Hour newspapers in Norwalk, Connecticut.
The company is locally owned by a trust, a much different scenario than the Tribune owned The Advocate, where I previously held the postion of Senior Web Producer.
The current sites are in great need, and the company is hoping I can bring them up to modern standards.
Hopefully the scenario will offer me the opportunity to make the sites a model for other newspapers of all sizes.
I expect to use many of the ideas you folks have given me to formulate a modern strategy that includes consideration of VRM, Attention, Gestures and syndication.
OPML will be an integral tool building these newspaper sites and services, as will the concept of River of News.
I also plan to use open APIs from other services like Twitter and Flickr and Grazr, to integrate these services into other communities.
Similarly, I’ll try my best to expose whatever services we can offer through the use of APIs.
There are great opportunities out there for media companies that are willing to do things right, and I’m hoping this will be a chance to do just that.
I’ve posted another hack I contributed to O’Reilly’s “PHP Hack”.
Sending mobile text messages from your Instant Messenger
I know Twitter is getting a lot of attention. I’ve been blogging from IM to everybuddy for years with BuddyBuilder.
I’ve decided to relaunch the project and make it open source. This should be interesting. OPML upload, River of news style rss aggregation will be key features of the relaunch.
Washington Post reports the Tribune sale of two local newspapers, where I am the Senior Web Producer.
In fact, I was the first person within the company to ever work on these sites, back in the nineties, when I volunteered to get them listed in the Open Directory, Yahoo, and Search Engines.
Back then I was (thanks to Philip Greenspun) trumpeting around the company for an idea called “community.”
You know, what they now call UGC (User Generated Content).
Personally, I feel we should go back to calling User Generated Content “community” again. It’s more accurate, and less derogatory.
But most newspaper folks would not understand what I mean by saying that UGC is a derogatory term. Because it defines the user as lesser than the site “professional.” But most people in this business would say, “yeah, they aren’t on the same level.” Most smart bloggers realize that’s just not the case.
However, when I say this, I don’t mean to devalue the work done by many “professional” journalists. Some of it is great.
Unfortunately, media is a commodity. Even good media is a commodity.
Do these companies still have something of value? Absolutely, but we live in a “hit and run” web society. I read this story in the Washington today. Tommorrow, It’s BuzzMachine that get’s my attention. Next it’s my family’s group blog, pointing out late spring lift ticket deals. After that, it’s TechCrunch, Library Clips, and CNN. You get the idea.
Back to “community” on a news site. They all thought I was nuts. Now it’s one of Tribune’s main initiatives.
A little late to the party, and I’m still not sure they fully understand it. They think community is getting people to contribute to their sites. They should be asking, “what can we contribute to the community?”
In the nineties, message boards and other community features did, in fact reside on sites. Today these features are distributed across a million sites. (I know about myspace. If they don’t open to the rest of the distributed social network, they will go the way of the old AOL. It may take ten years, but they will)
If they asked me now, where I would focus. I think I’d say “syndication” (thanks to Dave Winer). Be cog in the distributed web of information flow.
However, these news companies cling to a page view model, and a home-page-centric view of themselves, even if they are aware of all the story-level traffic they are getting.
Ajax, RSS, widgets, downloads, OPML and the rest of the trends all indicate to me that the future winners are the people and businesses that provide value in the relationships and conversations happening out there, not the ones who try to corral their “users” into a one size fits all product, that so many news sites are.
Ask not what the users can do for us, but what can we do for the users.
Marcelo Calbucci has a great idea that I think can even be made betterif we insert some attention metadata.
By focusing on affinity groups instead of mass popularity, we can extract the most meaningful news from the live web, rather than the just the most popular and the ones that popular bloggers link to (often the same).
Links are truly dead with a sophisticated algorithm that could do this.
I’m going to label it memerank ™ and use it on a share your OPML like project I’ve been playing with over at http://dev.glistn.com
I think the results could be interesting, but I’m curioous to know whether it will produce results that readers would want. I think it will.
Feb 01 2007 12:34 pm |
OPML and
Attention and
VRM |
No Comments »
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 ; ).
It’s funny how quotes can deceive.
Dave Winer quoted Mike Arrington about Daylife and I thought the quote was a positive one.
I though it meant that Daylife left out all the garbage you find at typical newspaper sites.
Turns out Mike meant leaving out RSS feeds. That’s not good.
RSS (and OPML) is more important to me than HTML. I think that trend will grow. Will that become a truth for the mainstream soon? I don’t know, but IE7 will certainly push it in that direction. No?
Just for that, the Old Media Doomsday Clock may be making a shift back a minute or two in favor of Old Media. Wow!
Stay tuned.
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