I have been thinking pretty consistently, but rather quietly about the idea of a domain of one’s own. In fact, I’m starting to read Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own for several reasons, but one of them is for some fodder for a presentation on the idea I will be doing at Duke University at the end of April. In the mean time, I was experimenting with FeedWordPress yesterday (the latest version of which works flawlessly on UMW Blogs) and I have to say I am blown away by the way it pulls in feeds from all sorts of services above and beyond just blogs.
I wanted to see how it syndicated tags from del.icio.us, Flickr and YouTube, so I grabbed a vanity feeds from each of these services and ran them through FeedWordPress on one of my test spaces on UMW Blogs.
Here’s the jimgroom tag on flickr:
http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?tags=jimgroom?=en-us&format=rss_200
And here’s the jimgroom tag on YouTube:
http://youtube.com/rss/tag/jimgroom.rss
And here’s the jimgroom tag on del.icio.us
http://feeds.delicious.com/v2/rss/tag/jimgroom?count=15
They validated without an issue and, what’s more, the stuff they pulled into the blog was rather attractive.
All of which means a UMW Blogs blog could serve as a way to aggregate and re-syndicate all the various places you live online, and the feed for which can provide links directly to all the the various syndicated services you are pulling in. Not to mention that you can filter your feeds from these spaces through tags making the whole thing that much more granular and malleable.
All this got me thinking about Joss Winn’s ideas for the new Prologue theme P2, a Twitter-like theme for WordPress and that should be available for general consumption soon. With something like that within a community like UMW, people could actually feed out their activity from various spaces into a stream of campus consciousness. A feed from around the various web services you use (similar to Facebook’s mini-feed or the activity feed in BuddyPress) but casting a far wider net in the services it can reflect. I think such a visualization of people’s activity would prove far more personal and powerful than the links to recent posts that show up on the homepage of UMW Blogs as of now. One issue with this may be that FeedWordPress uses the title permalink as the means to go to the original resource—need to test the possibilities here.
Anyway, just trying to think this stuff through, but this post is really just to say how happy I am with FeedWordPress these days.
I hope to see such a visualization, someday.
Wow. The whole integrated (er, aggregated) domain idea is exactly what we’ve been thinking of ss the future of the Thinkubator. The key would be an agreed-upon tagging convention among a small community of people living everywhere and anywhere online, and then simply pull all the different tagged feeds together. Instant postmodernism; a play of surfaces; etc. etc.
John,
Yeah, I imagine this is in the air right now, and it makes a lot of sense to me. What’s amazing is that it is all really close. Dropping off a feed for a tag through a blog, youtube, flickr, etc. is not that hard, but it will still throw some people for a loop. it would be awesome if as soon as you dropped off your URL, or put them in a profile page of some kind it automatically recognized the link for the service and parsed with the appropriate tag. That would be awesome, and make the whole thing truly as simple as entering the URLs of all the different places you live online in a profile page, filtered by an agreed upon tag. Then it puts the responsibility on each person to tag it properly, which could be a whole ‘nother can of worms.