With the increasing growth rate of the Sri Lankan blog community, the idea of a comprehensive blog aggregator being introduced has been discussed by several bloggers recently. In terms of the current number of blogs maintained by Sri Lankans, kottu and achcharu – the two widely known aggregators in
However, the current functionality of these two aggregators is regularly being questioned in terms of their ability to serve the potential growth of the Sri Lankan blog community. As several bloggers pointed out previously, their basic functionality with regards to listing the Sri Lankan blogs would prove insufficient as more and more people get acquainted with blogging. A look at the blog aggregators of other countries would give an idea of the position we are in at present.
To this end, I myself and some of my colleagues in the computer science department of the university of Colombo have decided to implement a Sri Lankan blog aggregator to serve this potential requirement. This could very well be our next team project and we hope to launch it by end of June so that it coincides with our mid semester vacation.
We (I) intend to publish this post as an open invitation for the bloggers in
- How should blogs be registered in the aggregator, is it by invitation to register or by some other process?
- What should the basic interface be like? (e.g. should the blog post be listed only by topic, a considerable portion of the post displayed in a pop up window or enable the reader to read everything from the aggregator itself?
- How should the popularity based ranking of the posts take place? (e.g. based on clicks or a voting system based on points as in digg.com or other social bookmark sites)
- Any other services expected along with the aggregator
- What form of categorization is required and how should the blog search facility be implemented?
We will bring about further questions and a formal process of gathering requirements as they come up for the next two months and we invite you all to share your creative ideas and thoughts with us.
11 Comments:
Why we need a new Blog Aggregator ? What is the problem with KOTTU ? Anyway if someone is interested in doing this, do it. But you may NOT be able to beat KOTTU for at least next 5 years. Again my cheers will goes to Kottu...
kottu and acharau are good aggregators and provide great service. but multiplicity of choice has never hurt anyone. too much market power is always bad. while some people may prefer to limit themselves by using ms's ie browser others will rather have firefox or opera.
quite apart from that there are several shortcomings in current blog aggregators as i indicated sometime ago in my blog. they are very limited in coverage and miss majority of sri lanka related blogs. kottu's ability to evolve to meet the expected increase in sl blogs is questionable. all this is probably due to the way the various admins envision their aggregators .they may prefer a sort of a cozy community like atmosphere to being comprehensive . you may want to differentiate by being more comprehensive.
How should blogs be registered in the aggregator, is it by invitation to register or by some other process?
both imo . be open as possible that is the best way .filter only copy and paste jobs.
What should the basic interface be like? (e.g. should the blog post be listed only by topic, a considerable portion of the post displayed in a pop up window or enable the reader to read everything from the aggregator itself?
if the aggreataor is going to be comprehensive it has to be organized and customizable according to user preferences. all this have to be automated .that would be your main challenge how to write programs that can categorize and organize post and users so that users see what they want to read easily
How should the popularity based ranking of the posts take place? (e.g. based on clicks or a voting system based on points as in digg.com or other social bookmark sites)
both. offer as much details as possible. be transparent
Any other services expected along with the aggregator
be an aggregator of all sri lanka related web content of all sorts if you have the time.
What form of categorization is required and how should the blog search facility be implemented?
this should not b limited to tags bloggers use, or admins prefer, but dynamically done( through software) using the actions of users. allowing them to tag , checking upon cross linking of various blog posts, and recognizing the patterns of clicks etc. sort of thing google does with search results
may be all that is way too much at present, but someone would have to make a start somewhere. so good luck if you want do it .
There is another Blog Aggregator not listed in your post.
http://www.geeklanka.com/
I have a bias about how aggregators should be written so I won't respond directly to the questions ;)
having said that, in my opinion there are just three things that are very important to get right from the start. Only two of those have anything to do with technology per se. everything else can happen later.
a) community
b) scaling
c) data gathering
I think (a) is obvious so I won't go into a lengthy explanation, but every single (successful) online community I've been a part of has had a core set of users to start things off. Reduce the barrier to entry to allow people to contribute and ensure that people get a good "reputation" for making positive contributions.
Scaling, well... an unreliable service annoys people. Yes, even if the service is free.
Don't become a victim of your success and buckle under load (be it of visitors or of numbers of blogs that you subscribe). Try to stay one step ahead of traffic and subscriptions as much as possible. It also helps to have realistic minimum benchmark values for various operations. For example, I get alerts whenever someone gets a page load that is larger than 3s, when a cron job runs for longer than 2 minutes server time etc etc.
This is also where the decision between writing your own or customizing existing software is important. There are tradeoffs either way, of course.
As for (c), gather as much data as you possibly can, even if you can't see an immediate use for it. Data helps you figure out new features. Not everyone wants to respond to requests for new features. This is for any number of reasons ranging from "oh, he's going to laugh at me. That's a silly feature" to "I can't be bothered". The more data you gather in the background (with the appropriate notations and privacy protections, of course), the easier it will be to decide which features are more important to people. And of course, you can use your own judgement (or your team's judgement) to assign priorities to those features thereafter.
just a few of the things that I figured out the hard way with Achcharu :)
good luck with your project.
sittingnut & drac:
thanx for those interesting thoughts. i'll make sure that they are taken into account as we develop through the project. and if it's not much trouble, i'd like you guys to join in by sharing your thoughts on the way and may be participate in the testing process.
btw, i have teamed up five of my colleagues, six altogether, to do develop this. since we are burdened with the approaching semester exams, we'll probably start the project mid June and hopefully we'll be able to come up with something appreciative by the end of June.
Prabath:
thanx for the link. i went through geeklanka.com and honestly i feel there's a vast scope for enhancement in that aggregator as well. what we are aiming at is a more personalizable (don't know whether such a word exists, but you get the idea) and an aggregator with more added features. anyway, thanx again.
RX Pharmacy Online. Get Cheap Drugs online. Buy Pills Central.
[url=http://buypillscentral.com/news_en-us.htm]Discount Viagra, Cialis, Levitra, Tamiflu Drugstore without prescription[/url]. prescription generic drugs. Cheapest drugs pharmacy
too much viagra buy viagra now how to buy viagra women does viagra work viagra from india viagra suppliers in the uk free sample prescription for viagra is there a female viagra viagra alternative free trial of viagra buy viagra on line viagra lawyer ohio cheapest place to buy viagra online buy viagra australian
But quiet, there are manifestly known companies which merit benefit words and created an distinguished Cheap Discount Viagra Pharmacy Online reputation.
Today it's very enigmatical to trust divergent medical companies order Cialis now, unusually those who the moment their meds online.
[url=http://www.xbox360achievements.org/forum/member.php?u=259462]mexitil online pharmacy[/url]
[url=http://community.bsu.edu/members/buy+online+Viagra.aspx]Viagra same day delivery[/url]
Post a Comment