B. Mann Consulting

See also: Feed Reading via People: Face to Face with Ton Ziljstra, Part 1

I wanted to share with Ton some of the information that came up during DrupalCon.

• NINA -- a bundle of Semantic Web (yes, big "S" -- it is an RDF store) tools being built on top of Drupal. Don't forget the Relationship module -- it's still around and still very interesting. RDF for a long time has had the perception of complexity. Secondly, it has had real performance issues as tuples can't natively be represented in a relational database. Both of these are chicken-and-egg issues, I believe. If there were more running code in an easily accessible platform that automatically created and worked with RDF metadata...well, we might see some interesting things :P
• Mixel and Ton should meet/talk more. Mixel's KNOSOS (Knowledge Sharing over Social Software) project has built some very interesting tools on top of Drupal and is continuing to evolve; we're all looking forward to see more on his tag visualization

Ton uses Qumana to easily cross-post to multiple locations. I'm unhappy with this as a solution, as context is actually lost. That is, there should be one canonical/permanent/referenceable URI for each blog post...or at least a GUID. Atom does this well, we need it to be better automated. To be fair, Ton does customize and/or intro each duplicated cross post, adding local context. Ideally, there is a field in the feed specs that could be used for this purpose without changing the GUID -- I may want to see his local context hints, but I don't want to see the same article three times from him. I know I feel the same pressure/need -- these collection of posts should be at Bryght as well as B. Mann Consulting because we haven't yet enabled automatic aggregation of targetted posts.

I was a bit late to BarCamp Brussels due to the wrap up of DrupalCon Brussels 2006 the night before, but I was immediately energized by the people there.

I jumped straight into an in depth conversation with Ton Zijlstra, a long time "blog buddy" who I met for the first time in person last year at BarCamp Amsterdam.

Somehow, we quickly dived into feed reading strategies. Ton uses essentially the "Blink" strategy (my words, not his) to capture hilights of the content that he reads. And that was our first point of interest. He doesn't read via content or by information/topic slice, but rather primarily reads via people. Ton uses Lektora, and tends to read in disconnected mode on the train.

Aside: I need to write up some thoughts on the use of media by "commuters"...I have a virtually non-existent commute, so my media usage is very different than those that do commute. Silicon Valley/the Bay Area has very long commutes...does this have an effect on innovation?