Communal topics and super-blogs

Communal topics and super-blogs

Something we’ve just got working today (okay Simone got it working, but I did a valuable job cheering him on) is one of the final pieces in the k-collector puzzle. The server now sends the client a URL corresponding to each topic in the cloud. This enables the client to create on-the-fly links back to the server referring browsers to a live page about the topic.

liveTopics had the concept of the table of contents, a local directory of your topics and what posts they related to. All very well in it’s way but a far cry from the super-blogs I wrote about last July. Specifically it wasn’t live (you couldn’t do anything with that data) and it wasn’t shared, MY topics MY posts, bleugh!

If you click a topic name on my weblog now you don’t get a local page but, instead, the dynamic k-collector page for that topic. At the moment this is an aggregation of all the posts about that topic from anyone subscribing to the cloud. Soon it will be much more. k-collector has become my super blog and pretty soon we aim to have many more people subscribing. We also hope to see other people creating clouds and boostrapping their own topic communities.

[via Curiouser and curiouser!]

I think Matt and company are on to something here. At a recent conference, I was asked what the biggest shift in technology’s use would be over the next year or two. My answer was that we would see a shift from storage to exposure. That is, applications that will become truly valuable in the enterprise will be those that are focused on presenting and delivering relevant information to people who want it, rather than just focusing on the capture and storage of that information.

The more I think about it, I go back to the last scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark… (update: gotta love Google Images, which found me the picture of the warehouse over at Scary Duck’s blog…)