Joho the Blog
An Entry from the Archives

Pito Salas, the person responsible for the free, open source aggregator, BlogBridge, has a new project underway. I wasn't so impressed with it until we had coffee together this morning. (Disclosure: I'm a BlogBridge user, and I'm also on its board of advisors. If Pito offers his new project commercially, there are unlikely circumstances in which I could make a little money from it. Frankly, my friendship with Pito is more likely to distort my opinion than the far whiff of money.)

The idea behind BBL is so simple that my first reaction to Pito was: Surely this has been done a thousand times already. But I think maybe it hasn't. BBL is designed for a group that wants to build a shared online library with some degree of centralized control and management. So, someone comes up with a way of slicing up the topics, hierarchically. BBL has tagging built in so if you prefer to skip the tree, you can. (Or at least you will be able to — BBL is still quite draft-y.) Different branches can be administered by different people. Everything is RSS-enabled. BBL inhales and exhales OPML. Dynamic folders can show the current contents of a remote OPML structure, raising the possibility of creating interlibraries. The aim is to make it dead easy for a group to build, maintain and make accessible a structured online library. It's cooler than I at first thought.

If you've got comments, go to BlogBridge and let Pito know. He's an open-minded, open-hearted sort of guy.

(Ironically, the links for posts about BlogBridge Library need to be organized better. Here's a link to the tag. And here are some key posts: 1 2 3 4. A preview is here. And there's a SkypeCast about it on Thursday.)