Tom Coates on Kinja:
So basically, I thought it was polished and useful but I didn't think it was interesting. But the funny thing is that I think I've changed my mind. And the reason I've changed my mind is because of the tiniest feature that I didn't even notice the first few times I used it - it's not the fact that I can create my own little version of
Haddock Blogs that's interesting, it's the fact that I can chuck it around to all my friends. I can link to it like
this and - if I wanted to - I could stick it at the end of my blogroll so that other people could play with it too. I could e-mail it to someone, or IM it or even just tell someone my user name and have them go and find it.
Big time. What was the single most important invention of blogs? Permalinks. Persistent links make micro-content eminently linkable and portable. What Tom is suggesting is beyond permalinks for blogs as individual voice, you need a form of portable link for zeniths of group formation.
...In my opinion - rather than setting up a central weblog for a course or a project in which people can post their thoughts only as comments, the simplest and most effective way would be to have something like haddock blogs or the uk weblog aggregator or a kinja group digest sitting in the middle in between all the participants...
Ultimate. There is a place in the middle of blogs. Sometimes its something like a Metablog, or Topic Exchange, Kinja, or an
Eventspace that persists. After you use a wiki for a while, the URL becomes your command line and each page or index becomes a portable link. Don't even get me started on projects, which requires a different space entirely, which is why this post most end before the commercial.
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_Follow-up from Clay_: What he said. Just want to echo Ross's intuition about Coate's post -- this is ridiculously easy group forming, blog-style, without requiring the central database of a LiveJournal.
Coate's personal plea to Nick is also worth quoting:
Please, please, please Mr Denton - don't try and sell me weblog-management. Don't try to make it easy to replicate the functionality of my RSS aggregator. No - your killer app is this sharing of digests, this creation of really user-friendly throw-aroundable clumps of groupness. That's the the core of the enterprise.
1. Stowe Boyd on April 7, 2004 8:52 AM writes...
Every community needs a plaza. Yes, by all means, create an aggregation of content from the network of blogs that a group may form.
But Kinja lacks a long list of obvious stuff (format control, commentary, etc), which Denton et al could add to make the aggregation of content something more than an RSS feedlist.
Permalink to Comment2. Chris L on April 8, 2004 1:52 AM writes...
I'd like to like Kinja. It seems like a great tool to introduce people to RSS, and perhaps for people who read only a couple of sites. But a sophisticated user (e.g. a user who has spent a few days browsing weblog feeds and finding interesting content) will quickly outgrow the interface.
And I fail to see what is revolutionary about the "digest" feature. How is this different from using Bloglines and pointing someone to your subscription list with its folders (which are the same as digests)-- except that it is much easier to get at, manage, read, and keep up with more than a couple of sites in Bloglines than it is in the pretty, but completely inefficient Kinja analogue.
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