“Jon Udell, Conversant, RSS Communities”

Early Thursday afternoon I had a 30-40 minute conversation with Jon Udell. Initially it was about Conversant... he's not a Conversant user, but he's good at recognizing powerful ideas, his book helped shape Conversant, and I like him.

We talked about Conversant, and how poorly Macrobyte had written its announcement. He offered to help me out the next time, and I'm definitely going to take him up on it.

We also talked about weblogs and RSS feeds, and the need for a new meta-layer above them to associate them together topically without worrying about their physical storage location. (This is the opposite of Radio Community Server, which associates blogs together by the server they're stored on.)

I said that this doesn't at all sound like a difficult problem to solve, as it's just a revision to the web-ring idea.

Why should you have to start up a separate "community server" just to start another community? It would be so much easier to simply have a registry for rss feeds which provides the same meta-features as Radio Community Server, but none of the storage features. Such a server could really be streamlined for the specific features it would offer, could handle a far greater number of weblogs than a server like RCS, and would allow your weblog to belong to more than one community at a time.

Why more than one community? Lots of weblogs now provide multiple RSS feeds (RSS is a syndication format.) Unless your entire weblog is devoted to a specific subject, and you never stray from that subject, you might want to belong to more than one community. TruerWords, for example, could provide RSS feeds for posts realted to Conversant, Birmans, or digital photography. Those feeds would be picked up by different communities, and it wouldn't matter that my site isn't actually hosted by any of them.