Much of The Community Engine's role had to do with getting supposed RSS standard feeds to mesh across a complex aggregation chain, for instance, tracking things that appeared to break at output but actually first broke four places earlier in the chain. There's been a lot of talk lately about how RSS is the new black of web publishing, enabling content to be dispersed far and wide with all sorts of interactivity, all seamlessly or at least nearly so. While that view is not out-and-out incorrect, it ignores areas in RSS processing that could do with systematic improvement. I'll be writing about that in future posts, using our work with the Corante hubs and other examples.

At this stage, I think many of the hubs' challenges are social. The editors will provide some value by synthesizing network contributors' posts, but the greatest critical mass will be achieved if the synthesis can come from the bottom up. In this regard, Oliver Thylman has made an interesting first stab by creating a search space across contributors' posts. This will allow contributors to better reference and therefore interact with each other. More needs to be done in this regard. Again, I have some ideas that I will share in future posts.