Blogoforum - blog+forum on blogoforum, idea and tagging

Who the hell is phillhow

Wed, 21 Mar 2007 13:43:32 GMT

My main interest is the delivery of technical support on the Internet. I will write mainly about that. The nature of "help" sites is changing from a very static Q and A format with users on one side and experts on the other; to a more dynamic distribution of information in well organized pieces that serve to educate rather than rather than just answer questions. Right now there are 5 main types of help sites: The contest or game style sites like Experts-exchange... Q and A taken to the extreme. These are on the decline in importance. Conventional forums like Codingforums. Not a popular as they once were, and many are badly run or neglected. Some will survive, but only as a reminder of how things were. Social news and discussion sites like Digg. These are very inconsistent in quality, and most like Digg fail to remain focused on the tech areas. They are sort of backward Q and A. Someone posts what they think might be an answer and the questions sort of find it through community voting. Right now these sites are the darlings of the geeks among us, but whether that is short term or long term is yet to be determined. Collections. Collections of related articles, collections of downloads, collections of snippets, directories of sites or blogs. Sometimes the answer to a problem, but without much support. There have always been collection, there will always be collections. They may evolve to support different types of collections like del.icio.us; evlove further or turning into something a little more organized and usable. Article and tutorial sites like Experts Round Table. The devlopment of permanent content generated from discussion, research and peer review looks like a good idea. It probably will not appeal to the Venture Capitalist, because it is the only current format where a small group of experts can compete with much bigger sites without needing advertising or big bucks; by generating a little buzz and making quality content available for free. Which reminds me to post http://www.expertsrt.com to give them a little buzz from here. I am going to be up front and tell you that I think Experts Round Table and other sites trying a similar approach sre the future of tech help on the Internet. I'm not going to post links to the big sites with wal to wall ads and paid subscriptions. The greed owners and their VC friends already make too much money. Over time I will be reviewing some of the help sites on the Internet with bias toward free sites, ad free sites, and sites that generate mostly original content. I will also comment on trends point out the good the bad and the ugly; and do everything I can to promote good article sites especially Experts Round table. BTW, if you think you would like to be a tech writer; instead of hiding your work on a blog, contact a tech article site. Then you will get support and help developing your article. I know my friend COBOLdinosaur at Experts round table would be glad to hear from you. See y'al later. ** If you need as answer ask anyone who calls thenselves an expert; I you want to learn find a teach, Mentor or guru. Experts only know the answer Mentors know why it is the answer. ** - 2 replies

Welcome, and one tip

Thu, 01 Feb 2007 08:19:33 GMT

Thats a great post Philhow. Welcome to Blogoforum. You came on the right time here. I'm brewing new ideas on how to let people to create their own communities here. If you're interested we can exchange a few words here or by email regarding how would you your community to work. Meanwhile here is one trick (undocumented) you can do. Navigate to a topic of your interest, say http://blogoforum.com/tag/review+site+support+technology+web . You will find "edit forum description" there at the top right. You can set title and description for that place. Try it. Denis Krukovsky Blogoforum - 1 reply

Web2Newswire.com

Thu, 07 Dec 2006 14:16:37 GMT

Hello, I would like to introduce you to Web2Newswire.com. It is a new user driven social content site where you can submit news, stories about your websites, businesses, blogs, and startups or anything Web 2.0. This is a especially good for startups and websites with less exposure. It is equally good for well established sites and businesses. Web2newswire is a new way you can promote your site, businesses, blogs, and startups. You get more exposure without spending a dime! The more site members talk about your site, the more exposure you get. The service is 100% free. Please let me know if you have any questions and/or comments. I can be reached me at info@web2newswire.com. Please tell a friend today. Thank you for your time. Regards, Nicola Louise http://www.Web2Newswire.com "The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn"

Digg Tagging?

Mon, 06 Nov 2006 16:17:35 GMT

The Mu Life author asked me to comment on his "The Role of Tags in Social Bookmarking" article. In the article, Muhammad talks about Digg requiring users to put stories into predefined categories, and suggests that tag-based categorization would work better. What can I say? As a big fan of tagging*, I completely agree! Here are few examples for you to though about. Let's suppose I have an article about say the design of new Mac OS. Or the article is about next-generation iPod design. What's the correct place of a story of such kind? There are at least three candidate categories, all are under "Technology": "Apple", "Design", and "Industry News", also probably "Software" for new OS story, and "Hardware" for a new gadget. I feel a bit lost. Why I am required to chose one category when my story is ok for three? Am I supposed to start a research on what the correct category is? When I'll make my choice, how about users who browse other categories and may miss my story? That's what the tagging is for. To get around these, let the user to tag the story as "apple", "technology", "design", "news", "software" or whatever. Give the user freedom to decide what categories to have and what information structure should be. I always missed tagging in Digg. Browsing its categories I saw stories on wide areas of subjects. While being interested in some particular topic (say "tagging") I didn't knew what category to look in. Should I browse all Industry News, Programming, and Software? del.icio.us, from the other side, has become my first starting point for a research on a particular topic. If I'm looking for must-have Firefox plugins I go to http://del.icio.us/popular/firefox , looking for startup partners advices I go to http://del.icio.us/popular/equity , and looking for digg-enabling a web site I go to - yes, http://del.icio.us/popular/digg . A few words to people who point on some limitations of tag-based categorization systems. Here on Blogoforum, I experiment with tags a lot. And hey, the system is a rich field for experiments. You can do a lot of tricks with tags. It was believed tag-based navigation is flat - I managed to introduce hierarchical tag browsing. Even more - using tags, the system can create a hierarchical categories-like information tree (see Forum Groups are in development for initial steps in this direction). Tag-based classification is very promising and an area open for innovations. * As you can see, I'm so big fan of tagging that I've developed a whole new tag-based website (called Blogoforum).

Blogoforum introduces Tag Hierarchy

Mon, 30 Oct 2006 12:59:54 GMT

After several days and nights of hard working, Blogoforum introduces new way to browse tagged info. Now you can browse the sea of tagged messages hierarchically. - 1 reply

What is Blogoforum

Fri, 15 Sep 2006 11:04:59 GMT

What Blogoforum is? What is it now, and what it can be in the future? Let's suppose somebody would create a universal discussion place to exchange information about everything. What would she end up with? Something like Google or Yahoo groups, or forum like MySpace forums which has 20+ sub-forums with sub-sub-forums and so on. Can we get something more? Blogoforum takes new approach. How to navigate through a sea of messages about anything? How to categorize messages properly and identify spam? How to give the power from moderators to users? How to find what's important or interesting? How to find an expert on a topic of your interest? Moreover, how to move the discussion smoothly from one topic to another, as it happens in real life, while keeping interested person on topic of her interest? The place we build here is aimed to solve this. Ideally, Blogoforum will be the new, better global knowledge exchange tool about everything. Now, it differs from today's forums radically, if not revolutionary. You will find no fixed forum hierarchy at Blogoforum. Did you ever experience frustration about which sub-sub-forum to post your message in? No longer. No more wrong sub-forums. Blogoforum posters use message keywords to categorize messages. Blogoforum has "forums" built around each keyword or set of keywords. To find messages of your interest, navigate Blogoforum using keywords of your interest. Browse messages about web 2.0, or narrow your search to web 2.0 idea. While writing the message, give it keywords you think are appropriate. Blogoforum will arrange a forum around each of your keywords, so you can get an instant discussion place around any thing of your interest, narrowing it down as you wish, using for example product or location name or something else. Blogoforum takes care your post to be noticed by people using Google or other search engines to find info on the same topic. Ever wanted to put the message into more than one sub-forum? Do you think it would be natural to put your story about traveling to California beaches to forums about "surf", "california", "ocean", "travel", "photo" and "car"? You can assign more than one keyword to your message. Moreover, who do you think should decide which category to put the message into? Should it be the message author, or moderator, or maybe you? Blogoforum think it's you. Now if you spotted the message within category you do not think are appropriate - give it keywords you think are correct. Say spam goodbye. As somebody writes more on some topics, Blogoforum will show her messages under her blog, her topics growing in size under her blog, and her name growing under those topics. This way, you can identify experts on topics of your interest here, or grow a reputation of an expert yourself. Discussion threads. Ever seen long multiple-page thread where valuable information is buried somewhere deeply inside, while the discussion jumps from one topic to another confusing newcomers and giving work to moderators? Time to change it. You will find no common discussion threads here at Blogoforum. Instead, any message is potential discussion-starter. Blogoforum will try to recognize thread-like patterns and show replies in a list or tree-like structure. Naturally, someone's post may raise new questions or different topics to discuss, so you are allowed to assign your own set of keywords to your reply, thereby starting a new discussion. This experimental system still has to prove itself. What do you think on the idea? Blogoforum is work in progress. Blogoforum's future is defined by you, people who use it to ask something or get some valuable info. If you miss some feature or have a thought of some improvement - write about it, and it likely your suggestion will be implemented and you will see it live. Upcoming features may include "popular messages" and "discussion groups" aimed to people who miss old sub-sub-forum hierarchy. Now who are the people who build Blogoforum? It is you, people who post on Blogoforum on topics of your interest, and Denis Krukovsky, the guy who knows a bit about programming, but makes English typos sometimes, which is natural since his mother language is Ukrainian. One of things why he started Blogoforum actually was because he wanted to respect replies of his readers and treat them as valuable and potential discussion starters. Thanks to Shrikant Joshi (his Blogoforum blog), Lindsay Donaghe (Lindsay's suggestion), Jason Brinkle (Jason's Blogoforum), Zef Hemel (Zef on Blogoforum), Maciej Blizinski (his Blogoforum), Nicolas Noben (Nicolas on Blogoforum), and all other people who provide valuable suggestions, tell friends about Blogoforum, or simply read what happens here! You can read previous "about Blogoforum" post if you are interested.

Blogoforum Updates

Thu, 17 Aug 2006 08:04:16 GMT

Blogoforum is updated with new version. Post editing is enabled for registered users. Another interesting feature is that while browsing some forum (say forum on web 2.0 idea) you will notice some topic links are dimmed out. Which means people think the topic is only barely suitable for the forum you are currently browsing.

Frontpage views

Tue, 11 Jul 2006 07:49:32 GMT

I'm thinking about what to show on the frontpage of Blogoforum. A list of recent discussion like currently present is a must of course. And so is the tagcloud. There are different tagclouds to consider, however. I can think of two: 1. A "what's being talked about now" tagcloud with popular tags in the past x days. 2. A more general "what's being talked about" with all-time tag popularity. Although this is probably less useful. Then what also would be interesting is a list of "hot" topics, topics that got the most hits or most replies, or the most replies in a short period of time. I think some sort of digg/reddit-like voting system is necessary too. But you already looked into that I saw somewhere. This rating also should be taking into account with the "what's hot" topic list.

Forum Groups are in development - your opinion?

Tue, 11 Jul 2006 06:56:49 GMT

Hey Zef, Thanks for joining Blogoforum and for the post! I'm preparing new method for message organization. The idea in short is: let the user to describe a tag or a set of tags, naming it "group" or "forum", thus providing more advanced "get a forum" functionality. Then we can describe a forum on software and recognize a subforum on programming within it, then we can recognize and describe a forum on PHP within it. That's the way to go. I wrote this in a hurry working on actual implementation so the description is a bit chaotic but you have me here willing to answer questions. What do you think about it? - 1 reply

Trying out blogoforum

Tue, 11 Jul 2006 06:55:36 GMT

This looks quite nice, definitely the best tag-based forum I've seen so far. For some reason it still appears to me as a bit messy though, have to figure out what exactly it is that makes it look a bit messy. - 2 replies

Edit tags for a post

Tue, 27 Jun 2006 09:24:08 GMT

I just noticed something that could be helpful. If you look at the Wordpress forums (http://wordpress.org/support/), you'll see they use tags there too. However, the entire thread is tagged - not every individual post. This may be against your entire idea, but I think I like that better. Or, it would be nice if someone could add or edit tags to their original post. - 1 reply