The Broken Spoke Bus for the Texas Top Hands Western Swing Band shared CC ( BY NC SD ) by Stuck in Customs
I’ve been whining for years about the frustrations inherent in trying to pull together the revolutionary promise of the syndication bus. So I was perversely heartened to read this (in my RSS reader, take that Scoble):
My feeds situation is a mess. I have this feed, and one for my worknotes, and one for my linkblog, and one for the podcast I do with Adam, and over time I’m sure there will be others.
If the godfather of RSS is struggling with aggregation, maybe I shouldn’t beat up on myself.
Then again, maybe that means Scoble is right. Maybe I should ditch this old school flava, and just get all my information from Twitter, accept the death of the open web, do all my publishing on Facebook, Google+, or whatever spying-for-free corporate platform that TechCrunch is investing in hyping today. I’m thinking of moving all my stuff to Pinterest. Chase the buzz!
Of course, if Scoble is not wrong, I don’t wanna be right. And I wonder… has Dave Winer seen the distributed dynamic wonder that is the ds106 Syndication Bus? Or Martha Burtis hopping up distributed comment aggregation? (And who knows, maybe some of that wicked Kickstarter scratch will find its way to FeedWordPress.) Or, for that matter, does Winer follow another RSS godfather, Stephen Downes, powering the Change11 MOOC with his homegrown (alright with me) engine gRSShopper?
Scoble is not right.
(Oh, and for putting me in the same sentence as Neil Young… there’s nothing better than that!)
Neil and Stephen: two scruffy iconoclast homegrown Canadian treasures.
I like the idea of a bit of that kickstarter scratch going towards feedwordpress, indeed helping to support in small ways various pieces of the open source infrastructure that’s helped power #ds106, good idea.
If I ever get to return to the North American continent, I’m going to bring you some cheese to go with all that whine.
Downes and Neil Young, I can pick up what you are putting downes 😉
As for the FeedWordPress development, it’s first on the list if we can actually keep the Instructure pledge (more on that when I know more). In addition to the server, I would also like to suppor the Mincecraft server, which is nominal, and the FeedWordPress development won;t be much more than $1000, so I would love to fund that embedded artist idea more and more I think about it. But in the end I think we’re going throw it up to a vote, make everything entirely transparent, and see what happens. The whole money thing is a very new development for me, and I can’t say I am entirely comfortable, but if it is transparent, open, and everyone has some input it may very well be awesome in making the idea that an investment in a community like this isn’t equivalent to a few profiting off the many. What’s more, it may very well be able to fund that syndication bus we have been trying to perfect as it integrates with Buddypress—that would be sick! And I am actually pretty sure that the ds106 syndication bus will be a more prominent space here at UMW as everyone is given their own web host and domain over the next two years.
@Scott – I left a comment on Jim’s blog last week saying how much I appreciate the surplus infrastructure that ds106 provides, even for people on the fringes… the radio station being the piece I am most grateful for. I’m sure this cash will go in that direction, no matter what…
@scottlo – This will tide me over until you get here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7f_A_frJKP4
@Jim – you are one of the few keeping the dream of the bus alive. I can only imagine the sense of responsibility to spend the windfall wisely and in the spirit of a diverse community. I sure didn’t want to add to that pressure by tossing off that aside. But I have faith that people have invested in awesomeness, however it goes.