Recently in BIT320 Blogosphere Category

Just thought I'd drop a quick note about progress with The Community Engine. We have a few exciting developments over the next few weeks:

• We will be getting out a white paper on the BIT320 Blogosphere. That should be quite an effort, with lots of PR.
• We may very well get a podcast going on the site. Podcasts are just a new way of distributing MP3 files using xml syndication. The main point being that you can subscribe to the podcast and have it delivered to you. A very nascent technology, but potentially big.
• The full web site should be complete sometime next week. The trick will be getting it paired down appropriately, so that it gets completed.
• The Community Engine should soon start work with Menlo. More on this one later.

I think this phrase is going to be sticking with me for a while. I'm currently helping a client, Leaders Connect, try to launch into the world of blogging. It was all based on some rosy predictions about how we could do things along the lines of the BIT320 Blogosphere, a blogging community composed of participants in a class I taught in fall, 2004. Boy, did that turn out not to be the case.

The BIT320 Distributed Learning Blogosphere (blogging community) is composed of a few components:

• An aggregation web site hosted by Myst Technology partners. The most important component of which (by far) are the feed harvesting pages for class participants and syndicated guests (A LOT more on how this component could be developed below).
• All of the feeds from student participant (OPML) and syndicated guest (OPML) blogs.
• The actual typepad blogging systems where students make their posts. This system determines in large part the extent and way students can contribute to the overall community.
• Client feed aggregators such as Sage (the one we adopted) that allow participants to track what is going on in the system.

So if the real issue in creating a blogosphere is creating a community, what is the role of technology? I think you have to consider two things:

1. Technologies that help connect people.
2. Technologies that help people get “information” value out of the blogosphere.

The two overlap, but they are not the same. Believe it or not, it's possible to get adequate solutions for both components for free or almost free, but you have to do some work. I think of this as the make side of the technology make or buy decision.