The Community Engine Blog
News, tools, and analysis for innovating in the information economy
« Helped develop and now have joined the Corante Network | | Mashups are more than just using big company data »
SuprGlu — Corante Web Hub in a Box?
This may not be a Corante hub in a box, but it could be a cheap, quick way to set up a knowledge sharing, community site.
Sections: Emerging Practice
Topics: aggregation infrastructure popularization
As readers of this blog are aware, I've been running a sort of mini version of a Corante hub in class at University of Michigan's Ross School of Business. Our hub, which we call a “remix” is different because it is meant to serve as a distributed blog space for the class to see each other, share information, and interact. There is no editor, it's sort of self-editing.
Well, just the other day, Lindsay, one of the students, came up with a real coup when she discovered suprglu. My cut, it's the 15 minute facsimile to the class remix (one guy has actually done this with his creative writing class). I've also done one so my bodybuilding personal trainer friend can track some relevant blogs I have found.
It lacks some things though. Let me provide a quick list:
- There is really only one way to see the tag cloud, good for recency, bad for anything else.
- It does not provide an interface for using the same tags across a number of people. We need the tag cloud people can subscribe to.
- The feed provides all categories in one <category> element. That's how del.icio.us does it, but the standard has moved toward a unique <category> element per category. Let me point out in passing that this is one of the most bedeviling aspects of consuming feeds.
- Display of the article feeds can be rough. This is because some feeds contain html markup and others do not.
- There appears some update latency. Updates can take several hours.
What I'd like to see is a service like superglu with more formatting and update options. It strikes me that they could charge a few dollars a month for this service, much like Sixapart is planning to do with Typepad 2.0. FeedDigest, a similar service but more oriented towards RSS-only output is already doing this.
This may not be a Corante hub in a box, but it could be a cheap, quick way to set up a knowledge sharing, community site.
Bud posted this on December 1, 2005
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://thecommunityengine.com/cgi-sys/cgiwrap/fpgibson/thecommunityengine.com/mt/mt-tb.cgi/5118
Comments
Sorry for the correction, but FeedDigest is primarily focused at HTML and JavaScript output. It differs from SuperGlu, however, in that it's designed to be used on pages you already have (or ones you're putting together) than for serving the pages directly itself. The main benefit of this, of course, is that you can use your own domain, your own layout, and even your own AdSense ads, etc.
Posted by: Peter Cooper at December 14, 2005 08:27 PM
