The Topic Exchange
New and improved. Thought I'd mention something new I've been hacking on for the last few evenings. It's not all done yet, but people are e-mailing me about it so here's a bit of an introduction:
The Internet Topic Exchange
It's the first (as far as I know) real-life implementation of Ridiculously Easy Group Forming. Basically, it lets you create sites like KMPings just by filling out a form.
Once you've created one, you can send TrackBack pings to it, and see them like so. There's also RSS for the aggregator junkies.
With any luck Matt Mower will be supporting it with his LiveTopics tool, so it'll be trivial to use from Radio as well.
Any suggestions / feature requests?
Indeed I will be. I hacked in the basic support for the configuration of this feature last night (since I was working on preferences code anyway). Adding the ping code as another publishing activity should be trivial.
What Phil has done is to implement a very simple, elegant, solution along the path of the BlogPlex idea I've been working towards. With the Topic Exchange, it will be simple for users to cluster around topics simply by using them.
What might be interesting is to combine this with the idea of synonyms (from XFML) so that even when people don't use exactly the same topic name, if they are talking about the same thing, they can still cluster with everyone else!