[WSIS CS-Plenary] WSISblogs.org: an idea worth developing?

[Andy Carvin]

Thanks, Rik, I appreciate the vote of confidence. :-)

For anyone who has not seen an aggregator before, here is an example:

http://kinja.com/user/acarvin

This is a free aggregating service called Kinja. I have set it up so 
that it will create a public Web page displaying the latest content from 
several blogs and news wires. It automatically retrieves new content 
from each source, then posts a summary of it on the Kinja page.

Similarly, I can see WSISblogs.org displaying all the latest blogs 
related to WSIS, plus allowing them to be sorted by topic, date, source, 
geography and language. I am beginning to explore several open source 
aggregating tools that might be able to do this; if anyone has any 
expertise in server-side RSS aggregators, please feel free to email me 
off-list.

thanks,
ac

Rik Panganiban wrote:
> Ah, a WSIS RSS feed aggregator. Yes, that would a great tool to have. 
> Particularly since there are a host of WSIS-related events in 2005 that 
> people will want to receive reporting on. OK, you've got my vote.
> 
> Rik Panganiban
> 
> On Dec 16, 2004, at 9:22 AM, Andy Carvin wrote:
> 
>     Hi Rik,
> 
>     No, that's not exactly what I had in mind. I'm not thinking of
>     re-creating DailySummit.net, particularly if David Steven and his
>     colleagues return for 2005. And I don't mean hosting blogs for
>     people, since there are free sites for people to do that already,
>     including our new digitaldivide.net website.
> 
>     What I'm suggesting is a RSS feed aggregator: a website that
>     retrieves content from all the websites like DailySummit and others
>     that will be covering WSIS, and hosting summaries of those blogs in
>     one place. Conventionbloggers.com is a good example of an event blog
>     aggregator, though it's missing some of the features I'd want. It
>     was created for all the bloggers who were covering the US political
>     conventions this summer. (The republican convention was the second
>     event, so that's why this site is showing conservative blogs at the
>     moment.) The site would capture the latest blog entries from dozens
>     of different blogs around the Internet covering the event and
>     aggregate it in one place, saving people the trouble of scouring the
>     Net for individual blogs.
> 
>     I'd envision doing something similar, but make it sortable by date,
>     topic, geography and language. I see the site as a place where
>     people can follow WSIS-related events in near-real time, as bloggers
>     from various sources post content. So if you're blogging, I'm
>     blogging, DailySummit's blogging, Ralf's blogging, others are
>     blogging, summaries of our latest blogs could appear in one place.
> 
>     Technically it shouldn't be that difficult, and I'm trying to corral
>     some volunteers from the blog technical development community for
>     design, hosting, etc. Fortunately there are a lot of blog techies
>     here in the Boston area, so I'm talking about the idea with them.
> 
>     And you're absolutely right, we also need collaborative online
>     workspaces that go beyond blogs, since blogs certainly can't do
>     everything. I'd love to have us experiment with the new Digital
>     Divide Network website as a collaborative tool. The site can host
>     free blogs, bulletin boards, document storage, news and events
>     listings, articles, etc, and is free to anyone working on issues
>     related to the digital divide. We're going to use DDN for the
>     telecentres caucus, and invite other groups to try the site for
>     themselves and see if it could be useful to them.
> 
>     http://www.digitaldivide.net
> 
> 
>     thanks,
>     ac
> 
-- 
-----------------------------------
Andy Carvin
Program Director
EDC Center for Media & Community
acarvin @ edc . org
http://www.digitaldivide.net
Blog: http://www.andycarvin.com
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