Content Management Systems (CMSs) help create identity, community and collaboration, and Rich Site Summary (RSS) automates and fosters communication within and between these identities and communities. If CMS-based websites are like silos of knowledge on specialised issues, RSS is like the wind that blows between them, cross-polinating all the ideas, people and communities along the way. Aaaaaahh... sounds del.icio.us to me.
I had never seen or heard about PubSub before. I first saw it over at
bryght.com where they have integrated it with Drupal.
Integrating PubSub, MyYahoo or any other automated RSS generation service into CMS aggregators such as Drupal is a powerful combination.
This debate has a lot of priceless tidbits for those of us interested in on-line campaigning, organising and activism.
See also:
Kos - Exley Debate
Here's an annoucement worthy of being included in my blog.
EFF Joins Forces with Tor Software Project - Civil Liberties Group to Support Development of Anonymous Internet Communications System
A friend of mine, Richard Rogers, just published a book that I can't wait to read. He has done some really neat work based on the (relatively) new science of networks. From his announcement...
Here is an MP3 recording (45Mb) (speex format ~ 9Mb) of a discussion with with Russell McOrmond (Flora.ca) organised by Maxime Piché and held at StudioXX in Montreal, Quebec. The topic is Intellectual Property & Government with a focus on the canadian contexts surrounding:
"Podcasting" (a.k.a. Personal Option digital, a.k.a. audio blogging) is to radio and other multimedia as blogging is to text. It would be a simple matter to enable Drupal to play a role in this exploding desktop audio publishing phenomenon.
Outside of North America people use SMS (short messaging service) like crazy! In many parts of the world this cell-phone based text-messaging system is the only one that's readily available. There's no question that there's a long list of real world applications just waiting to be developed based on importing and exporting SMS messages to and from cellphones and websites.
I think that Drupal is very well placed to take advantage of this opportunity as a result of both its increasing use in and among advocacy and community-building circles, and the modular nature of the code.
The first item on my Drupal Wishlist is CreativeCommons licensing to be integrated directly into Drupal. Not only would this enable users to select and associate appropriate liscences for and to their works, these liscences would allow content producers to follow the propegation of their works across the internet as they get exported through RSS/XML feeds.
On another level, I have no doubt that this has huge potential to signicantly leverage the credibitily that Drupal has established as a powerful technical tool within advocacy and community building circles.
One of the important limitations of Drupal over the years, especially from the perspective of somebody living and working in Quebec, Canada, has been its inability to manage multilingual content in any comprehensive way. Hopefully, all of this is about to change.
