Recently in syndication Category

I had a chat with Andy Seidl of MyST Technology Partners today. Andy has a web service called blogsite. This is a package deal for marketers that allows them to tap into syndicated searches and blog content, blog themselves, and syndicate their own content. Further, Andy provides read-outs on technical quality (broken links, etc.) and whether you are blogging frequently enough. All of the syndication features are available for the do-it-yourselfer in various web services such as technorati, pubsub, feedster, and findory. They can be tied together using feedreaders and blog posting software. A lot of work for the neophyte. Further, neophytes have a hard time maintaining blog frequency.

The nearest competitor I can find to this type of service is the new sponsored content blogging service recently announced by Paul Short. He wants to blog for marketers to the tune of $20–25K per month. Is this a blogging replay of “Mike Mulligan and the Steam Shovel” (the children's classic of man vs. machine)?

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.

Ben Hammersley makes an interesting observation about how atom can be the pivot point for a number of tools to process blog content. Based on my last post, I have to say all the more power to him, and he should go further. Why not do something like make atom the output format for Movable Type and other blogging software?

Andy Seidl (MyST) and I agreed today to use Typepad for the student interface in the “BIT320 Distributed Learning Blogosphere”. The decision really emphasizes the strength of service-oriented architectures based open standards: we can pull in the best pieces each vendor has to offer to create (we hope) a best of breed composite offering. MyST is going to provide back-end aggregation and synthetic feeds. Typepad will provide the user-friendly front-end.