B. Mann Consulting

See also: Feed Reading via People: Face to Face with Ton Ziljstra, Part 1

I wanted to share with Ton some of the information that came up during DrupalCon.

• NINA -- a bundle of Semantic Web (yes, big "S" -- it is an RDF store) tools being built on top of Drupal. Don't forget the Relationship module -- it's still around and still very interesting. RDF for a long time has had the perception of complexity. Secondly, it has had real performance issues as tuples can't natively be represented in a relational database. Both of these are chicken-and-egg issues, I believe. If there were more running code in an easily accessible platform that automatically created and worked with RDF metadata...well, we might see some interesting things :P
• Mixel and Ton should meet/talk more. Mixel's KNOSOS (Knowledge Sharing over Social Software) project has built some very interesting tools on top of Drupal and is continuing to evolve; we're all looking forward to see more on his tag visualization

Ton uses Qumana to easily cross-post to multiple locations. I'm unhappy with this as a solution, as context is actually lost. That is, there should be one canonical/permanent/referenceable URI for each blog post...or at least a GUID. Atom does this well, we need it to be better automated. To be fair, Ton does customize and/or intro each duplicated cross post, adding local context. Ideally, there is a field in the feed specs that could be used for this purpose without changing the GUID -- I may want to see his local context hints, but I don't want to see the same article three times from him. I know I feel the same pressure/need -- these collection of posts should be at Bryght as well as B. Mann Consulting because we haven't yet enabled automatic aggregation of targetted posts.

Corporate use of aggregated/group blogs may be pointing towards more of a focus on feed reading via person. Or are also trying to solve the cross-posting issue mentioned above.

• Flock actually wrote the Planet module for Drupal to help in aggregating employee blogs. Not only that, it is easy to indicate which posts should actually be cross-posted by the use of keyword filtering.
• SocialText uses the built-in multi-user community blog feature of Drupal -- they don't currently aggregate. This is an out-of-the-box Drupal functionality -- there are feeds available by author (all multi-author systems SHOULD have this...I'm again reminded of this crazy mixed feed from the Om gang that still continues to annoy me) as well as the aggregate feed.

I only know of these corporate examples because they use Drupal. Pointers to other examples appreciated...ideally NOT using the Planet Planet code, but something integrated directly into the corporate site.

We were discussing upcoming conference schedules for the next 6 - 8 months. Ton knows a fellow Drupal compatriot, Gunnar Langemark, because of his attendance at REBOOT. It sounds like a conference I should make time for (and I've been meaning to). But conferences planning now needs to take place *globally* -- the LIFT conference wanting to know the Northern Voice schedule indicates as well that we digital nomads are not geographically restricted. But we are still restricted by space and time to only be in one place at a time :P