I'm posting this here to ask for help! How can we aggregate BP's blogs? How can we receive email when others post new ideas or requests for help?
Dear fellow BPers:
I woke up daydreaming along these lines (which look suspiciously like a famous book by Richard Bach):
"Feathers slightly out of place, the self-assembled gang of seagulls looked down. So many boats with fish around them, but where to start? So much energy, but how could they work together? It looked as if each could only control their own altitude, their own direction and their own speed ..."
So here's my thinking about the Bloggers' Parliament:
We have (at least) two problems:
- what to focus on: ideas for the many, ideas for the few
- how to work "together": not tight, but open and viral
We have (at least) two distinctive features:
- we are bloggers: we write, we comment, we link
- we are thinkers: reactive thinkers, proactive thinkers
What can we do?
1.- We can
use some blogging technology to "tie our blogs together" somehow.
Maybe we can use an aggregator so that "it" does the job of putting links to all recent BP stories on one page, in order to make it easy to follow our fellows' work. We follow what's going on. Others do the same. I don't know how that technology works. I've heard there's a
python script that can produce that one page which then has to be uploaded. There may be simpler ways to do that - maybe using some already available service. Google "blogs aggregator", perhaps. Or ask friends.
An example
here. Trouble is, it looks like blogs need to use "RSS" (whatever that is) in order to be "aggregable". Hand-made ones (such as Natalie's) wouldn't be "aggregable". Maybe Natalie (or others) would want to use another site for their BP-ideas? Apparently, my host uses RDF, not RSS. I too need help.
There's a way to "subscribe" to each others' blogs by email. Every time a new story is posted, a message is sent to people who want to follow your blog. I don't know how that works specifically. It could be too much, and I wish I could get a summarized message every week. I don't know if this needs "RSS" or whatever.
2.- We can
use "stories" to communicate among us. Maybe one of us has a pet project and can
invite ideas: maybe Josef can write
"next week, I'd like to see some specific ideas to push green electricity forward". The general idea of
"green electricity" is good but it could use some help in becoming practical for more and more people. So any of us can "lead" and the rest can "follow" or "ignore".
But we need to "be easily aware of each other" first.
3.- We can
use "comments" as a way to work together. "Stories" in our blogs are good, but sometimes "comments" are even better! Perhaps a "story" can ask for ideas, or it can ask for exploration of an idea, or can ask for even better ideas. I suggest let's not neglect comments. If any of you post a comment at http://parli.blogalia.com (which is having infrastructure problems, sorry) then I'll link to your blog specifically, saying "thanks".
To add up:
- Thinking can be seen as having
3 phases: set up a problem area, gather or create ideas, explore those ideas to improve on them or make them more practical. Each step is valuable. We can all help each other and follow each other.
- We need to receive news from each other's work.
Maybe we're almost there and eager to do some real work?
