mtl3p

I haven’t had much time to blog recently, but I’ve been thinking about you all.

That is to say, I imagined you all into a community - because I only know about 25 of the people that read this blog -but in my mind the community is a bit larger - around 50. And I miss interacting with that community - even if it is mostly one-way -especially with the imaginary 25 of you ;-)

There’s probably a few more readers who check in here everyonce in a while (or who read the rss feed when it catches their eye), but they don’t get included in my imaginary community either.

How does it feel to get grouped together with a bunch of people you don’t know and told that you are (thought of as) a community? For a bunch of blogs that I follow I think it would feel perfectly obvious to me (like sylvain’s or boris’s blog), but other’s wouldn’t occur that way to me. I’m thinking of how I don’t feel a sense of community with everone who read the last Margaret Atwood book.

More about imagined community later. and I got some great posts about communication history that are waiting to be written.

I’ve been thinking about how I blog. Mostly about how I’ve been a real pussy in using this tool (please excuse the sexist language). Specifically for the last 2 months I’ve been thinking about what I say with this space tool opportunity and how I say it. I know that I do a lot of promotion - of myself, of IleSansFil, and of other projects that I’ve been involved with. I have no problem with that. I”m going to continue to do that. I have a problem with what I haven’t been using this space to say or to share.

What is bringing this to a head is that I will soon be teaching others how to blog - “at-risk” youth. And I’m going to feel like a complete hypocrite telling them that authenticity is one of the keys of the micro-publishing revolution when I am so circumspect in what I publish. I’m also going to feel like a heel in telling them they have the power to write anything they are feeling when I limit my writing so evidently.

Mainly - I don’t think that I should be utilising this tool to pretend to be a one-man newspaper. I don’t want to emulate print tools. I’m not trying to be a “citizen-journalist” or a novelist. this is (could be) something different and I’m frustrated by how I’ve been shying away from what I could be doing.

I’m not sure what’s going to come after this. I don’t want to turn this blog in to a livejournal about what I had for breakfast or who I think is cute, but there’s a lot more I have to say than what’s come so far.

From Lists to Social Content Engines

thought bopuc or seb might be interested. It’s about the unexploited possibilities of lists. I liked the stuff about half-way down about aggregating. Maybe I need another sem-web tutorial, though.

Fling writes a fun, clear entry telling his peeps about commentlogging, and Martin led me to http://del.icio.us/tag/mesCommentaires and came up with a solution to the problem I brought up of how to archive two comments on delicious if they are for the same url.

“Sur mtl3p on dit que del.icio.us ne peut mettre 2 fois le même signet : alors comment faire si on met plus qu’un (1) commentaire sur un billet (et que l’on veut faire des entrées différentes dans del.icio.us) si le blog n’offre pas de #anchor?

Et bien c’est simple, ajoutez le â la main ! Dans le champ url de del.icio.us, ajouter “#” suivi d’un mot ou d’un chiffre. Le url est considéré ‘différent” par del.icio.us et le blog n’y voit que du feu.”

Sweet.

http://del.icio.us/tag/commentblogger

UPDATE: Two people thought I was proposing to change the tag “mycomments” to “commentblogger”. So, to clarify, this is a response to this post. I’m proposing that people tag their own blogs with “commentblogger” if they display their rss feed for “mycomments” on their blog. Capiche?

So I was checking out how http://del.icio.us/tag/mycomments was growing and I found myself chuckling as I was reading the extended field of fling93’s bookmarks. He writes (some of) them not to remind himself, but for an audience. I’m sure I’ve seen that before but it made me wonder if anybody uses delicious as a linkblog. Not grabbing the RSS feed and displaying it elsewhere, but actually as the primary site of communication with others. As in, every day I make sure that I add one item to my delicious list, and I write some witty or insightful commentary to put inthe extended field (within the 250 character limit) about the link. Hmm. If I had some more time I would just add a tag for that (linkblog?), start blogging there, and tell people to subscribe to it.

It’s nothing that crazy, but it’s fun to think of delicious as a place (equivalent to blogspot), instead of a tool/utility. I imagine that there are lots of people that use flickr that way - people who don’t have blogs, but who encourage others to come check out their latest photo on flickr. One thing that cheeses me off about del.icio.us (and that would get in the way of this use) is that there aren’t any permanent links for individual entries.

but I had to link to Hugh’s blog. He’s got it exactly right.

“adding an rss feed from del.icio.us/NAME/mycomments back to his blog sidebar, so his comment posts are appearing on his sidebar.” Its the same thing as what I have, except mine are more concise because the comment content only shows up on mouse rollover, and his appear directly under each link.

Scroll down - it’s on the right-hand side - under “My Comments Elsewhere”

His probably works better because people can more easily see what he actually wrote (”works better” to me means that his readers would be more likely to follow the link).

If I ever learn this stuff I would have it setup in two ways - 1) just showing the name of the blog where I commented so that it functions as a second generation blogroll. And then 2), as hugh does, by showing you the actual comments. It might be better to show the comments on a separate page of the blog - the way Boris does with his blog, photoblog, and linkblog.

I’m in trouble. I’m about 10 minutes over :-(

Update: trying this mycomments

Boris gave me a hand by setting up my delicious “mycomments” feed to show up on the top right-hand side. I’m happy because finally I think the cool thing about this is to use it as a way of blogging, not only to keep track of my own comments. If you’ll notice, it’s set up so that if you leave your pointer on one of the links, the content of my comment shows up.

Seb explains it all better than me here. (you have to scroll down a bit)

And Robin has been up to cool stuff too. And it got picked up by slashdot (so jealous).

My favorite though is this guy. He talks about the “mycomments” thing and then he talks about Robin, “By itself, this is an interesting usage of del.icio.us, but combined with Robin Millettee’s durl service for monitoring del.icio.us URLs, or conceivably PubSub, some second order effects could kick in.”>

Of course he would have no idea that Robin and I are pals. I feel like Robin created Durl on this blog because of the comments he left here.

Update: trying this mycomments

Let’s see what’s happened so far.

Here is a list of everyone using the “mycomments” feeds as well as a link to their delicious area:

Hugh’s mycomments

synesthesia’s mycomments

CR4D’s mycomments

Lilia Efimova mycomments

adh’s mycomments

neurofluoro’s mycomments

together, we get:
http://del.icio.us/tag/mycomments

I don’t know most of these people. I just checked out the above link and followed who was posting with that tag.

There are also lots of people using the tag “comment” and “comments“. But there is a lot of junk in there because people are using those tags for other purposes as well (mostly about comment spam).

UPDATE 2005/01/02: I’m adding some joiners:

JC’s mycomments

sbpoet’s mycomments

Sebastien Paquet’s mycomments

Amal’s mycomments

Joi Ito’s mycomments

Rick Gregory’s mycomments

I know that delicious is about everyone using their own tags / emergence / folksonomies / yada yada. But I think everyone should use the tag “mycomments” for this keeping track in delicious. And then I can keep an I on the rss feed for the tag “mycomments” in delicious and I’ll see what people are saying. Fun!

and by the way, now is a good time to say that keeping track of comments via delicious is not the part that I find so interesting. I think it’s cool, and I thought of it myself, but it’s no big deal. This guy was doing it long before I started.

What I’m excited about is this being another form of blogging. I can subscribe to someone else’s “mycomment” rss feed, or (hopefully) some people will display their own “mycomment” rss feed on their site. It’s like being your very own mini-guest blogger ;-). And I also keep on thinking of it as a 2nd generation blogroll.