ReadWriteWeb

Topics: Automatic for the People

Written by Richard MacManus / May 21, 2004 11:45 AM / 2 Comments

Matt Mower's written a great explanation of how the K-Collector aggregation process works. KC is a very clever system and I'm pleased to hear it doesn't actually require the KC client app on Radio or MT in order for people to participate in the KC community.

What I will do is continue with my own experiments with Movable Type. I already have the TE cloud reference in my RSS template, so I'll add the KC cloud reference too. Then as I write posts I'll add topics using my chosen MT field (at this stage 'Keyword', but I'll probably change to 'Category').

Note that I could download the MT client Matt's created, but I'd actually rather play around myself with MT and see how both KC and TE pick up my posts.

Likewise, I've asked Phil Pearson if Topic Exchange can pick up my ENT data from my RSS feed automatically. If I can get both KC and TE aggregating my ENT data, without me having to ping either one, I'll be a happy man :-)

Also I should perhaps clarify my goals with all this. In the short-term I want to:

1) Set-up MT so that I can add topic data to both KC and TE.

2) Set-up my own internal topic navigation, which ideally I'd like to synch with KC and TE (in terms of topic names).

For now I'll leave the hard part aside - i.e. synching topic data between KC and TE. Matt's done a lot of work on this in the past, using XFML and XTM and so forth, and so he can tell you it's not a trivial task. So let's call that a long-term goal.

I guess my remaining goal for the short-term is to try and convince Phil to get TE to automatically aggregate my ENT data from my RSS feed. But being a humble user, I've no idea how difficult a request this is - i.e. it's easy for me to ask the question, it may be a lot harder for Phil to do the work ;-) So I don't want to press the issue...

Also, I want to investigate Blogdigger some more to see how I can tie in my topic navigation experiments with Bloggdigger's categorisation system. Greg - any ideas for that?


1 TrackBacks

TrackBack URL for this entry: http://www.readwriteweb.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.cgi/2365

Comments

Subscribe to comments for this post OR Subscribe to comments for all Read/WriteWeb posts

  • Cool. I'm really keen on this whole topic sharing thing; I think it provides significant power when done within a single context or hierarchy, which seems to be what ENT/TopicExchnage provide.

    Think about a Blogdigger Group - and the popular subjects that are associated with each group. If you had a way to import the topics from a defined group of blogs that you felt focused on similar ideas as you...and they all did the same...you are all adding to a shared hierarchy.

    It's not much different than K-Collector, which arguably works better in a controlled environment, rather than on the Net. The main difference - your topics can exist on their own (Blogdigger uses the more common dc:subject and/or RSS 2.0 category tags) as well as within the context of a Group (or several groups).

    I'd be happy to whip up some form of export for the topics of a group, probably XTM or something like that.

    By the way, I would totally blog this, but my blog is still non-functional.

    Posted by: Greg Gershman | May 20, 2004 8:51 PM



  • Thanks Greg for your feedback. I have both ENT and enabled now in my blog, so let's see what we can do with them...

    Posted by: Richard MacManus | May 24, 2004 1:19 PM




Grab this swicki from eurekster.com


RECENT JOBS



TEXT LINK ADS


RWW PARTNERS


RWW READERS