Joho the Blog
An Entry from the Archives

I wonder if this might be something like Bloglines with wiki? Great idea.

So MetaFilter, only smaller!

Excellent! I'm very interested in exploring ways that information / knowledge is *better* (or, at least, more fun) when, as you are getting it, you are also aware of other people you know who are getting it at the same time or have already got it (or haven't yet got it, too).

The main interface I'm working on for my project, the iCite net will, I hope, facilitate collaborative reading / viewing / listening / writing (annotating / commenting)--possibly along the lines of what you're describing. It's attempting to combine presence, visual and/or audible gestures, text (reading and writing), and shared views each other's grouping of stuff.

Why aren't mailing lists good enough for this?

adamsj, good point. Mailing lists do serve some of this function. But I think there may be room for a web-based version: Mailing lists push information so we're somewhat careful of using them whereas a social reading site would have as many feeds as the group wanted; you could skim to find the ones you care about. Also, mailing lists are an awkward way of doing commentary. And they are highly limited in the extra functionality you can build into them because they're limited by email readers.

You've just put your finger on why I use web-based interfaces to read certain of my mailing lists.

Yahoo! Groups has quite a bit of functionality already--Topica has fewer features, but still allows one to pick and choose what one reads. (I find it interesting that Yahoo! Groups I'm in mostly make very limited use of the additional functionality provided.) Neither supports topic threading, which I think is much of what you want. (A third-party interface could be built to do this, I think.)

Your point that "mailing lists are an awkward way of doing commentary" is all too true, in my opinion, but people surely do use them effectively for commentary anyway.

A bigger problem for me is the speed of the feedback in a mailing list, encouraging extremely contentious discussion. (John Barnes supposes in Kaleidoscope Century and The Sky So Big and Black that for a meme to capture your mind, it has to get you into an extremely tight loop. Thus people on Mars can talk to memed people on Earth safely, due to the speed of light lag.)

I'm not sure there's a fix for that, other than hacking human nature. (I'll get right on that.)

There's some discussion near the bottom of this thread about using a weblog in analyzing questionable documents. I haven't looked at the site referenced therein, as I'm afraid most of the postings will be below (or is that above?) my current level of partisanship, but perhaps you could give them a fairer shake than I think I can.

Nearly forgot--I wanted to point you back at a quote in one of your weblogs from earlier in the year:

Katrin Verclas: I'm involved in very local campaigns and we use listserv. It works like a dream. If you go to down where the grassroots organizing is actually happening, we'll tell you what we need. And it's not the stuff you've designed for the national level.

It's not what you're talking about here, but it's still something to keep in mind.

suggest you check out rojo - it might move this way...

Well, there's Allconsuming.net.

But you could use http://del.icio.us for this. Just make your own tag and popularize it; it would even have a web feed.

Are you familiar with ReBlog (http://www.eyebeam.org/reblog). Also check out Unmediated, another site running the ReBlog system (http://www.unmediated.org)

Y'know, why not look through Yahoo! Groups and see if there are groups with the same stated purpose as you, see what features they make use of (and which they don't), and what they've added to the system?

Y'know, why not look through Yahoo! Groups and see if there are groups with the same stated purpose as you, see what features they make use of (and which they don't), and what they've added to the system?