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Dave Johnson on open web technologies, social software and Java

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Sunday Feb 01, 2004

The Weblog Community Aggregator.

A new type of web site is becoming popular in the weblogging world: the Community Aggregator. A Community Aggregator is a portal-like web application that displays weblog posts from a group of closely related but separately hosted weblogs and provides synthetic newsfeeds so that readers may subscribe to the group as a whole.

I'm not sure where this concept originated. The first such site that I recall is Javablogs, but others have suggested that Blawgistan was one of the the first and that O'Reilly had a community aggregator in 2000. I'm not sure when weblogs.oreilly.com came online. O'Reilly's Meerkat came online in 2000, but it does not really fit my definition of a community aggregator.

Portal like experience for web browsers. Web browsing visitors who visit a Community Aggregator experience a portal-like web site centered around the display of the most general of the synthesized newsfeeds.

Other information included on the portal page might include list of links to the weblogs included in the aggregator and display of other newsfeeds of interested to the community. For example, an open source software project might display the newsfeed from the project's bug tracking system and the newsfeed from the project's build system on the sidebar of the portal page.

Synthesized feeds for newsreaders. Synthesized newsfeeds are intended for users of newsreader software such as FeedDemon, NewNewsWire, or SharpReader. The synthesized feeds allow you to subscribe to the community as a whole instead of picking out specific individual weblogs.

The owners of an aggregation site might set some rules to limit which weblogs are included in the synthesized newsfeeds and what type of weblog entries are included in the feed. For example, community aggregation site javablogs.com allows anybody to sign up to be included on the site and asks only that included weblogs be primarily about Java. O'Reilly Weblogs includes only O'Reilly authors. The Planet Apache community aggregator allows only weblogs belonging to members of the Apache Software Foundation.

Features useful in a Community Aggregator:

Allow users to mark weblogs as favorite-blogs or ignored-blogs.
Count clicks on each weblog entry.
Allow users to design their own synthesized feeds.
Allow administrator to "pin" weblog entries to the top of the page.
Download subscription list as OPML
Weblogs.com API RPC interface
Search API RPC interface
Portal-like web UI

Examples of Community Aggregator sites:

Community Aggregator software

Spycroll - Python blog aggregator used by some "Planet" sites?
http://planetplanet.org - is this the future home of the software that drives the various "Planet" sites?
Monologue - ASP.Net application that drives the Monologue site.

Online aggregators and build your own feed sites:

Weblog servers with Community Aggregator-like features:

I was attempting to explain what a community aggregator was for my talk next month and ended up with the above article. Thanks to Ted Leung or Planet Apache and Mike Cannon-Brookes of Javablogs, who both helped out by answering my questions. If you know more about the history of community aggregators or can provide other examples of sites or software, please leave a comment.

Dave in Blogging 09:18AM Feb 01, 2004 Comments[7]

Tags: Blogging

Main | Next day (Feb 2, 2004) »

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snoopdave posted a photo:

That's my VW Golf getting a car wash in a creek somewhere near Ocho Rios Jamaica in 1992
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