[Imc-uk-process] knowledgelab report back - rss/aggregating/indymedia

[ionnek]

Hi,
a scatty report back from the knowledgelab in lancaster.
wiki is here, but no reports yet afaik:
http://knowledgelab.org.uk/wiki/SecondKnowledgeLab
I'm only sending it to tech, it seems too messy for imc-uk-process, but 
maybe you can make sense of it.

The knowledgelab was on campus, we had 3 rooms and a small room with a 
few computers, the hacklab. And coffees and food and a cafeteria and a 
kids corner and sofas and some music. I'm not adding all the links to 
the various groups and events, but they can be traced from the wiki. And 
I didn't take proper notes, so i might get some people and themes mixed 
up. So please read this more like a personal reportback from memory than 
any kind of official minutes.

I spent most of the time in the "propergander stream" room, which could 
also be described as an alternative media stream. Quite a mix of groups 
had shown interest to participate in this stream in advance or showed up 
on the saturday morning: indymedia, clearerchannel, 2 artists from 
chicago who work on video archiving and video history,  a group from 
Spain working on a blogmail application (allows you to automatically 
blog your emails), the alt.media.research project, katie who works on 
licencing and copyright/left/creative commons, r7 with a project on 
tools for printing alternative media, anas who works on publishing and 
free speech in the middle east, and many more.
We spent the morning introducing the various projects and session 
proposals to each other, and made an agenda for the weekend.
The main session I want to report back about is the session on 
indymedia, blogging, aggregations and rss feeds. There were quite a few 
informal conversations about how to connect the indymedia uk website 
more to the blogsphere and the culture of exchanging links connected to 
it. The session hooked onto this issue. I'll tell you what I remember 
from this session, mixed with my own thoughts, throwing around ideas. I 
am completely new to the rss and aggregator debate, and i hope that you 
will be able to make sense of my report despite the scatty language! 
Hopefully we'll get proper minutes later.
Basically there are two issues: to pull additional postings and 
information into the imc uk website, and to push postings and info on 
the imc uk website out into the blogsphere and other related websites.

pushing out: We already have rss-feeds, for the newswire, the featues, 
and i think several (or all?) regional and thematic topics. That means 
that it is technically possible for everybody to
show imc uk news on their blogs, or add them to their aggregators. An 
aggregator, as far as i understand it, is an application that allows you 
to "bookmark" several blogs and websites so that you can see what's 
happening on each of them every day at one glance (i am new to this so 
please correct me!). An rss feed allows everybody to show that website 
section (for expl the imc uk newswire) on their own blogs or websites.
Somebody said that he wouldn't add an imc uk newswire rss feed to his 
side because there were too many postings that he found not interesting, 
and the features wouldn't change often enough. On the other hand, imc uk 
can technically provide more specific feeds. The postings on the 
newswire can already be filtered, according to which boxes people are 
ticking. I think, for example, that the migration newswire works quite 
well - not much spam but regular postings. If imc uk wanted to have its 
rss feeds added to more websites, it would probably be good to 1) work 
on specific topics. Many regional newswires already have a lot of work 
going into them, and should be attractive to "local bloggers". On the 
thematic topics, i think there is room for improvements, just on the 
content side. 2) We could probably make the possibility to use the imc 
uk rss feeds more well-known, let people know about it, by publishing 
features about them and by mailing groups and pp we know.

Our "thematic topics" are, compared to the "tagging" of blogs, quite 
static. That means that if you post an article on imc uk, you can only 
choose from existing topics, you cannot make your own, new ones. It 
might be worth thinking about ways to make our "topics" or "keywords" 
more flexible, in the long run. So that it works a bit like flickr, 
where you can specify your own topics. I have no idea wether and how 
that would be possible technically, and if people are up for thinking 
about this at all.

pulling in: Mickfuzz explained that it can be a pain for videomakers to 
upload their videos. There are quite a few websites where you would want 
to upload your clip, but it is a pain to upload the same clip several 
times. If i understood him right, the idea would be to create something 
like "one point of entry". As i understood it, that would mean to decide 
on one website (could be a specific video archiving website like 
clearerchannel, could be imc uk). If videomakers go to this side to 
upload, they could tick boxes for other websites where that video should 
appear as well (or just a description plus link for it). So if you 
upload your video on clearerchannel, for example, the posting appears 
also on the imc uk newswire and x other pages.  (not sure if i got this 
right). Or if they would go to the imc uk publish form, they could tick 
boxes of other alt.media websites where their video should appear, too.

Similarly, we thought about text or pictures, or rss feeds. For example: 
for the g8, there was a syndicated page that pulled together rss feeds 
from a number of bloggers. g8bloggers or so it was called. There is also 
a page "indybloggers", a collection of rss feeds from blogs written by 
indymedia volutneers. how could these blogs be integrated into the imc 
uk website?
A simple way would be a navigation box, maybe like a linklist, which 
just links to interesting blogs. More sophisticated would be to link 
from the frontpage to an aggregator, which includes everything we think 
is interesting - and could change whenever we like to. This would mean 
finding consensus on what we want to aggregate.
Even more sophisticated or even"distributed" would be a link called 
"make your own aggregator". I am not sure how useful that would be as 
other webplatforms exist for this. But we could maybe work on a 
collection of aggregators, one for "civil liberties", one for 
"environment", one for "actions" or "social centers".

That's all for now. I am very excited about this topic, and the 
possibility that indymedia might in the future become not only a 
"journal", but also something like a "pool" of news and info from the 
social movements, something that people can use in their own media 
practice as bloggers or aggregators or whatever they call themselves.

best
ionnek


















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