thats sounds awesome BB !

I'd love to offer my blog for the beta.

I'd planned on it Gary. In fact, was hoping to enlist my neighborhood as the beta test group.

Not sure if I agree with your assessment of Meg's column. I don't get the sense from her article that format is the "key" to anything; rather, only that format and features play a large role in shaping weblog communities. (I wish she would have gone beyond the anatomy of a post and included weblog "components" like blogrolls, comments, etc.) It's hard to imagine having such "distributed conversations" and social networks without them. The current concept of a "weblog neighborhood" (not the blogroll, that's different) wasn't popularized until Mark Pilgrim's RSS link idea was adopted.

I agree that people are the key, but I think the article focuses more on how the format enables the network.

I am so there. I mean, I just got used as an *example*, how can I not participate? :)

Is there any way to make this work out-of-line? Sucking RSS feeds won't work because the links are gone, but I should think auto-linksurfing should be able to generate the graphs with a fairly high degree of accuracy. Serialize the results to a blog of their own (updating existing entries every so often), and...

But there's probably some obvious reason this wouldn't work. I am so not an RDF expert.

Scott, I think Meg started in that direction, and then she went into this components of weblogging BS that just destroyed any continuity in regards to weblogging community. At the end, she could have pulled it back together, and then ends with "As with free speech itself, what we say isn't as important as the system that enables us to say it."

Doesn't matter if speech is free by constitutional right, if people don't excercise it.

I know where she's coming from, hence agreement with sentiments; however, she re-directed the focus of the article away from the important aspects of weblogging. Disappointing.

I'm in for beta testing and also would be happy to integrate it into BigBlogTool once you get a formal spec in place. I think its a great idea and would be more than willing to invest my time in offering it to my users.

Dorothea, very good points.

The RDF community has been looking at how to mix RDF with HTML/XHTML, through links and otherwise. My preference is to embed RDF rather than create separate pages. Especially as RDF becomes more used out and about. For something like Blogspot, we have to have this type of functionality.

We could pull hypertext links or generated RSS from weblog pages using weblogs.com, but there's no intelligence to a link.

By using RDF, we're adding some commentary, title, focus, direction, categorization (in a good way). We're doing more than creating an outliner of RSS - which is where this is going to be taken by the time I come back online by party or parties unmentioned. Betcha, betcha, betcha.

Dorothea, you've raised good points, which is why I posted this online now rather than wait until I finished the product. I want to work with the community, not just deliver a product fait acompli.

Ruzz, that would be super cool.

I should have prototype, preliminary RDF vocabulary, and formalized documentation, most likely put into Source Forge at the end of my trip. Needless to say, this is an open source product.

RD-2D? (3PCO?)
What she said. Beta me. Fantastic idea.

RDF = Resource Description Framework, Denise. Fancy-dancy way of associating things with other things and commenting on the associations, is what it amounts to.

See w3.org for more. If you dare. Most rational beings wouldn't dare.

Shelley, I've only been semi-blogging recently, but I'd love to participate in the beta. I get all droolly whenever you rant about the importance of community.

Oops, email address above is wrong. Serves me right to not have my own domain.

I'm SO there, Shell...as a matter of fact, I'm already sitting on the curb and I'm not goin' till you hook me up. Beta me, girl!

Boy am I glad I'm not the only one that thought the article by Meg was way over the top. Her comments about the blog format is typical of people who misunderstand McLuhan's "the medium is the message" philosophy.

Bb, pull this off and go directly to the bloggers' pantheon! This would be the coolest thing since--well, since blogging itself, so far as I'm concerned.

I'm in, Shelley--I'm in for all of it, any of it, and whatever else you want me in for!

Good to see that I'm getting a goodly number of beta testers! The best type of testers, too - multi-threaded bloggers.

Plan on testing within the first part of July. If all goes well - and so far the technology is humming along, I just need to make sure the product scales and can hopefully existing in a distributed state - this will go production before end of July.

Count me in for the beta and beyond!

I'm really tired of the revisionism I've been hearing the past few weeks.

First the conservative circle jerk claims they invented the weblog.

And now what I thought were reasonable people are chasing Meg with pitchforks and torches because she had the audacity to point out that the weblog is the merger of enabling technologies, and writing style.

Meg wrote huge pieces of the Blogger codebase, and I'm disgusted to hear her get beaten up over her explanation of the technical and literary conventions of the genre.

It's not "the people". That is equivallent to saying you can't have writing, conflict or stupid "which LoTR character are you" quizes without people. Until we get machine intelliengce, it goes without saying that those endeavors require people.

By the way, RDF requires a little more than people. It needs people with expertise and skills. Andrew Sullivan isn't one of them.

Bill, I'm not beating Meg up about talking about technology - honest. I write about technology all the time, and enjoy reading other technical articles, including hers.

What I was unhappy about is that Meg mixed the concepts of technology and community - starting out with a fresh perspective about community in weblogging and then going into this 'safe' explanation of weblogging components. By doing so, she didn't necessarily provide effective coverage of weblogging community or weblogging technology; you can't mix concepts like that without causing confusion.

As for Meg writing much of the Blogger code and being one of the founders of weblogging - that doesn't cut it at all. I'm not going to like or dislike a piece out of loyalty, not when it's published in a professional genre, and Meg is writing as a professional journalist. To be blunt, she wouldn't appreciate that, at all.

My opinion is, and still remains, this was not one of Meg's better articles. She played it safe, and it shows. She has written much better material in the past, and I've referenced these with appreciation.

Regarding Andrew Sullivan - not sure where this one came from, but though I don't read his weblog, from what little I do know about Sullivan, he doesn't know much about technology. We're in agreement on this one.

Not sure if I'd be a good beta tester for this or not, since I don't always participate in a lot of blogversations (although I have been doing that more lately), and I've got a non-standard blogging tool (read python hack that's in the process of being overhauled). But I think this is an ingenious idea and I'd love to help or participate in whatever way I can.

I've been watching this mini-meme for the past few days and I'm astounded, flabbergasted by the assertation that Meg somehow "failed" the weblogging community because she decided to focus on the uniqueness of the format.

The idea that tools and format aren't important anymore is wrong, of course. If they weren't, how come weblogging didn't emerge earlier? Why was the Web a wasteland of content-free "under construction" Tripod homepages circa 1996? Why did it take the emergence of tools like Blogger (which do indeed impose a structure on the medium) for weblogs to reach the tipping point we're witnessing today? It's obvious to anyone that people alone weren't enough.

The weblog format lowers the barriers to entry. Sitting around and having Big Important Thoughts about weblogs isn't doing nearly as much to get new people to begin weblogging as having easy-to-use tools and an appealing format that makes it easy for the beginner to write.

Count me in on your beta test! Sounds like a great idea.

It's not that I'm not interested, I've just been supremely busy... but yes, I'll definitely help out with the testing.

Not that I tend to jump into a lot of conversations out there... I think the last cross-posting I did was the whole feminism bruhaha, but hey. New toy. Shiny. Yum.

yeah, I'd love to try it....

wow, I'm looking forward to seeing this in wide use. Great stuff. I'd offer to use beta, but my site's blogger and I really don't get enough referals for it to really be put to use. bah!

Good luck on the project though, and I will definitely keep my eyes open for the results.

Hey! New vict...urh testers. Great!

You all feel free to send me functional requirements and things you'd like to see this tool have. Okay?

I love this idea, (and I love Meg too, as it happens).

Such a tool is most needed IMHO - it would further 'communalise' the blogosphere and possibly deliver the knock-out blow to the lamentably semi-redundant USENET. Especially if you incorporate some graphical flow chart thingymajigs Bb ;)

Count me in on the beta. Wish I had more time to participate in the specs too.

The discussion about the tool continues here, for those who missed it :
http://www.quicktopic.com/14/H/P96CAYje2yc

Beta me, please. (Radio)

Quick question about cross-blog threading vs. comments like these. Do you see the one replacing the other? Perhaps working together? Is there a simplifying assumption to be found?

A few thoughts about the meg article broohaha. Damning the post does not damn the poster; the attention, while negative, acknowledges the poster is worthy of feedback. One of the joys of blogcrit (our mediacrit) is commentary on someone's specific post, peer review at an atomic level. Part of the feedback cycles that improve content and metadata quality.