Prometheus 6

what is it you're trying to get done?

I want a pretty representational view of Black folks to come out of it. Since I write weird stuff topics of my chosing may skew things a bit.

are these political issues only? or, topics related to black issues?

That's a good example. Me, I'm going to pick politics, maybe some sociology. People may feel relationships are it this week. Even within politics I'd likely pick different issues than most.

What I'd like is to identify the topics and coerce folks to write about one they didn't select, in their own blog space. I could aggregate them...but I can't collate them.

I want a pretty representational view of Black folks to come out of it.

how'ru going to get a representational view of black folk? i'm kinda weird myself so i don't think i count as representational :(

What I'd like is to identify the topics and coerce folks to write about one they didn't select, in their own blog space. I could aggregate them...but I can't collate them.

is this a blogocracy, blogacism or a blogtariat? seriously & technically, what is your selection criteria & how are you going to aggregate that exactly?

seriously & technically, what is your selection criteria & how are you going to aggregate that exactly?

Well, that is the rub, isn't it? The closest I've come to my actual ideal is to ask participants for a particular RSS feed, maybe a single category on their blog. Say Monday morning everyone writes on what they think is the most important topic at hand.

Those posts will be sorted more than selected. I was thinking of having folks rank themselves on a conservative to liberal scale, a libertarian to authoritarian scale, and an assimilationist to nationalist scale. Make them searchable and bring up excerpts and links for the sites found. And a couple days worth of voting, or maybe discussion in an online forum,  will give me topic rankings.

Reports summing up who categorized themselves how, OPML lists, all of that with the idea of making Black folks more findable are also in my little head. I believe I know how to make polls accessible outside the site too (by the way, it won't be P6 hosting this, it will be the Niggerati Network...I need to keep the option of kick folks out of my space. I'm talking a different kind of thing than I do here)

I can do these things. I just worked with the guys who operate the Air America website to integrate the Amazon associate program with their featured books. I've spent the last year or so working on customizations for Drupal and there ain't many limits.

The only way it will work is if people actually engage it. If they don't I get to look all foolish and alone, but hey, you take risks for what you believe in.

drupal sounds interesting, may be useful for one of my clients. thanks.

do you have a mockup of this thing? do you have a mission statement? how do think you can engage folks in what you're trying to do here?

About Drupal, I think of it as a CMS construction kit. It has good defaults, a lot of customizability out of the box and some solid add on modules (couple flaky ones, but that's open source for you). Theming it gets hairy. If you want to know more about it, shoot me an email.

Back to my little fantasy, I have some proof of concept stuff. Like I have a module that lets users add their web site and RSS feed to a site's aggregator. The module lets you decide set default categories and categories users can assign themselves to. They don't have to be the same..like in my testing I set up categories blogroll, user entered, then liberal, centrist, conservative. By default every user entered feed gets the "user entered" category but they never see it or the blogroll category. It doesn't quite fit the need but it shows the need can be met.

I also have OPML feeds created by category from a site aggregator.

Beyond that, the core Drupal system ships with a forum and node moderation is available in a seperate module. So I don't have a real mockup but I could make one pretty quickly. A real site would need a custom feed aggregator.

In my head, my mission statement would be that stopping the lie thing, expressed in terms of facilitating, increasing exposure...needs work, obviously because the high concept isn't system oriented.

The engaging thing is half marketing and half service. Make it easy to engage and to disengage. I figure register and display a link is all you need to do to get into the serachable aggregator. Second level commitment would be two posts a week: the most important issue of last week and what you think of someone else's most important issue. Write it on your blog, I'll come get it. It will display as a post authored by the member which they can log in and edit, link to taxinomy term, comment links will take you to the member's blog. 

I have a totally non-heirarchical system in mind No hit counts, no link tracking. I intend to present the result of the search in random order. I'm thinking of the search as an echo chamber locator. Set a value for one or more of those three scales and find everyone within a point in either direction.

I have other ideas that it doesn't make sense to discuss if it has no appeal, ways to let them give them feedback to the site itself.

That's all services. The marketing part of engaging people is, honestly, to come up with a marketing plan for the site that I can share enough of with users to make them think it might work.  This has not been done yet. I've been getting clear on what I want to do.

i was lead SQA for the publishing system on a major online service, used NCompass Labs Resolution (now Microsoft CMS), tested SharePoint, installed a JetBox One demo for kicks. i love the smell of bad code in the morning, kicking programmer butt & my buglist was feared.all bowed down to me when i entered the war room -  (ok, i'm exaggerating ... it was only the dev manager).

i'm a little rusty. but if you're serious about this you need to unfuzz & write a solid spec. would love to read it.

but if you're serious about this you need to unfuzz & write a solid spec.

I know...it took this time to prove to myself what I could do. I'm actually a lot less fuzzy about it than I seem from the above.

It's funny...the Air America thing was my first time coding for the open source community. I'm really a lot more corporate than they. I like definitive specs, but open source stuff is more like whittling than carpentry.

I may take you up on your offer.