Wednesday, July 10, 2002

Communities of Blogs Recent posts by Ugo at CocoBlog follow in the thread of adding "community features" to CocoBlog. This subject also applies to the larger Cocoon community, IMO. The usual tools include email, email on list(s), a portal, a blog (natch), ..., open source components. A friend of mine, Don Baccus, has been involved in openACS (Open Architecture Community System) which uses AOLserver and (among others) Postgresql to make community portals. Dotlearn, at the Sloan School of Business of MIT is a version which currently is nearing release in a new version using the latest openACS. [dotlearn faq] One of the nicest features of the openACS system is the forum section where discussions are organized on subject threads, rather than the micro threads of the subject headers of email messages. [openACS forums] Notice how the initial post can be followed on the same page with comments, like a wiki. Perhaps something like this can make it into cocoBlog? Suppose clicking on a subject rcs feed subscribed you to a forum discussion area that aggregated all participants entries within this subject area, much like the "categories" for radio blogs, but categories for cummunities, rather than the individual blog? 3:38:28 PM

Quoting Ugo Cei... Bake, Don't Fry. Aaron Swartz makes a distinction between web publishing systems that fry sites, serving them fresh to users every time, and those that bake them once and serve them up again and again. [Be Blogging] Andreas Hartmann's Cocooncenter is prepared "baked" using cocoon, although parts of it are using perl (the forum, I think). They recently put up the sources to the site. 7:20:26 AM