Update: Latest on Technosight's Web 2.0 Blogoposium
posted Thursday, 29 September 2005
Web 2.0 Blogoposium Happenings So Far
Technosight's innovative Web 2.0 blogoposium that's taking place this week is coming along pretty well so far. In fact, it's actually turning out to be quite a Web 2.0 proof-of-concept in its own right. It's a success in terms of actual content too. Contributed blog posts are accumulating steadily and so are some interesting visualizations.
One of the stated advantages of Web 2.0 techniques is that they allow information from all over the Web to be pulled from services and then mixed, mashed, aggregated, and syndicated in interesting and useful ways.
And this is how the Web 2.0 blogoposium is being conducted, using some of these very techniques.
As an example, the visualizations for the blogoposium are being stored on Flickr by anybody who wants to contribute by tagging them with 'blogoposium1'. This allows the visualizations to be found and mixed with any blogs that have the same tag. The tags are placed by the submitters (or anyone else via external mechanisms) either on the blog itself or on social bookmarks with the tag.
This has allowed all the contributions to the blogoposium, which are really happening all over the Internet and in multiple mediums, to be aggregated easily in places like Technorati. This is done by the use of a simple tag and URL, which Technorati knowns how to use to "magically" find and pull together the content dynamically for anyone to see.
This demonstrates that useful lightweight value chains can be assembled ad hoc using simple, straightforward Web 2.0 techniques like tagging and no central control. In this case, a simple tag reference allows all blogoposium content to be instantly assembled virtually.
To see this actually work, just follow this URL, which is a Technorati permalink for the blogoposium content and is aggregated dynamically when you click:
You can see this is just a standard web URL with 'blogoposium1' tacked on the end. But when followed, Technorati look s at the tag and uses its software to find and aggregate all blog posts, del.icio.us bookmarks, and Flickr pictures from all over the Web that have this tag. It then displays them in one page to see (or, you guessed it, to reaggregate.)
This is powerful, useful, and easy stuff. Just like the Web should be. In turn, you can consume the RSS feed directly from this URL and get any new posts that get tagged, anywhere on a published blog feed, essentially creating a new dynamic service that is a feed for the whole blogoposium. All by using a simple tag to annotate distributed content and then putting it at the end of a content aggregator's URL.
This is a prime example of the possibilities of Web 2.0: syndication, tagging, aggregation, and participation have made this blogoposium happen entirely using a self-service model, with little needed effort on collation or organizing the contributions, and with all that much more focus on the resulting thing that ultimately matters most: the blogoposium content.
A big congratulations to Ken Yarmosh for coming up with this innovative symposium format that so clearly demonstrates some of the promise of Web 2.0.
As an added demonstration, here is a Flickr badge that shows the latest Web 2.0 visualizations contributed to the blogoposium, updated every time you refresh this page:
Figure 1: Different Visualizations from the Web 2.o Blogoposium
Ken himself has also just posted the latest highlights of the Web 2.0 blogoposium so far, check them out.
Technorati: blogoposium1, web2.0links: del.icio.us
There is one aspect of central control - the tag.
