I just had one of those Ah-Ha moments.

Back in the day we used to focus group discussions on a subject around a mailing list. The participants knew where to find the latest conversation and it was pushed to you via email. Now we've exploded these discussions all over the web into individual blogs, blog posts and comment threads on blog posts. It's still way too hard to track who said what about the particular subject and who replied to your post. We've tried all sorts of things to try and cope with this all the way to trying to use common tags and using Technorati and things like it to bring it all back together.

Over on Tribes, they're having a Terms and Conditions crisis. Somebody asked if you could build a P2P version of Tribes wth no central controlling body. I thought of Skype Group chats and Groove. Then I remembered the Microsoft SSE RSS extensions and Ray Ozzie.

So now imagine an extension to Blog CMS software that allowed a blog to subscribe to a federated group of participating blogs that maintained state between themselves by replicating the conversation around using RSS SSE. This would begin to look like a mailing list again, but where there was no central server.

Or have I just re-invented NNTP and Usenet?


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[ 14-Dec-05 11:23pm ] [ , ]