Anil Gangolli

Groups and aggregation

Joe Reger sent the Roller dev list an e-mail asking for feedback on this Group Blog API proposal . I started to post a comment, but I just hate typing anything significant into a 3 line textarea. So here’s a trackback post instead.

Squinting hard, I see basically two separate ideas in the proposal:

1. Group aggregation. The group aggregation idea is hot, and deservedly so. We all have groups in which we work, play, or share ideas, and despite the fact that it supports the tendency to form cliques, I think group aggregation is an important feature for blogging. However, the proposal specifies a “push” model. I prefer the “pull” model effectively demonstrated by Planet Roller , which serves as a group aggregator for the Roller folks (and a few guests of Dave), and I prefer the mechanism of the tool underlying that page. The pull model is more resilient to failures of the aggregation host at the time of posts being collected, and requires no new infrastructure in most blog tools. The push model puts a lot of burden on the aggregation site to be up, or on the posting sites to queue in case of failure. In the pull model selection of specific posts is readily handled either by pulling RSS feeds by category or adding filtering functionality based on topic tags.
   
   

1. Group administration API. This is potentially interesting if rights are properly distributed and managed. I confess I haven’t yet critically analyzed the proposal to make such a determination. One can imagine a group blog feature in a blog engine (or simply a blog aggregation engine) with an administrative UI that provided for setting up new group blogs, essentially by setting up RSS subscriptions. Exposing that same functionality as an API would probably be valuable.

Technorati tags: Roller blogging blogware

Posted at 07:18AM Feb 23, 2005 in dev  |  Permalink