I mentioned in my last post that one of my ongoing interests is topic mapping in weblogs. Topic Exchange and K-Collector are two initiatives that I've hyped a lot over the last year. However the blogosphere still doesn't have a mainstream topic-mapping application - and I mean mainstream as in Technorati or Bloglines, apps that are used by a large percentage of bloggers.
Seb Paquet recently re-opened the conversation on topic-mapping in blogs, and Rogers Cadenhead and Dave Winer have been talking about it, so it's on peoples minds. I'd like to suggest the following...
We need to meld the best features of Topic Exchange and K-Collector.
Topic Exchange and K-Collector each has its strengths. K-Collector has a great add-on for Radio Userland, which allows you to easily select relevant topics and add them to the community server. Topic Exchange requires you to send a trackback ping to its server for each topic, which makes it more open and extensible but also more effort for the blogger. Topic Exchange has a strong user community - it's like an open source project. K-Collector seems to be aiming at a corporate market and so that's where their development focus is I think. Nothing wrong with that per se, but it does mean I'm more emotionally attached to Topic Exchange these days.
So the two development efforts can learn from each other. For example, it'd be great if Topic Exchange can automate its ping process a bit more (I'll try and think more about this, so I can offer some potential solutions), and K-Collector can keep the blogosphere in the loop regarding its continued development (e.g. more updates, especially to the mailing list).
I wonder if it's worthwhile merging Topic Exchange and K-Collector? There is so much talent in each project, but perhaps topic mapping has its best chance of gaining mainstream acceptance if we work under one umbrella "project". What do you reckon, am I getting all hippie about this or is a combined project a viable solution?
Cross-posted to Topic Exchange and K-Collector
Comments
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I posted a whiles back about shared topics - this is a more important development for smaller communities, as opposed to the web as a whole, I think. But it would be nice if, in MovableType for example, I'm given the choice of associating topics from the TopicExchange's directory along with, or as opposed to, the topics in my own blog. I'm sure it wouldn't be too hard to add support into the blogging apps to create a TopicExchange trackback ping, send it off to the TopicExchange, which could automaticallty create new topics as needed.
Also somewhat relavant - Blogdigger supports searching by topic: try http://blogdigger.com/search.jsp?q=subject%3Atopics&sortby;=date for all blog posts that are contain "topic" in their subject or category fields.
Posted by: Greg | April 25, 2004 6:25 PM
I like your aims, and agree 100% that such a combination would be really good. However I believe it's worth taking a step back, and rather trying to merge Topic Exchange and K-Collector, make both of them work with a common framework. That way, if there's an additional kind of application, you only have to look at the framework, not the other two apps (same idea as programming to interfaces).
OPML is underspecified, and doesn't tell you in a standard fashion how different links are related. It appears to work well for single-purpose applications, but is hopeless for interop across different systems, because there's no standardization on how things should be represented. e.g. the aggregators all use different interpretations of the spec for their feedlists.
The RDF framework *is* eminently suitable. There's more of a learning curve for developers, but there's also a much greater payoff. If TE and KC had such interfaces, then immediately they could not only interoperate with each other, but any existing RDF data, e.g. FOAF or RSS.
Posted by: Danny | April 26, 2004 1:51 AM
Thanks Greg and Danny for your thoughtful comments. Much to mull over there... If anyone else has some ideas, feel free to deposit them here and I'll perhaps write it all up into a summary post.
Posted by: Richard MacManus | April 26, 2004 2:24 AM