Wednesday, August 18, 2010

Mechanics of virtual blogging networks

I’ve seen a few posts lately about the possibility of virtual blogging networks. Sorry if this has all been covered in more detail already by others; I am way behind on my blog reading right now. But I did want to post about how easy making a virtual network is. The hard part is just getting the people together to do it.

  • Everyone who wants to participate in the virtual network has their own blog wherever they want.
  • When someone posts something that they want added to the virtual network, they tag it with an agreed-upon tag (“virtual post,” say).
  • The person who sets up the network has an account on a blog aggregation site like Yahoo! Pipes. They aggregate all the blogs by tag. The exact way to do this will differ for each blogging platform For example, to aggregate all Dog Zombie posts (on Blogspot) tagged “veterinary fact of the day,” the URL http://dogzombie.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default/-/veterinary fact of the day would be added to the aggregator feed.
  • Profit! Oh, wait.
Easy. The only question is: do bloggers want to write for virtual networks, and do readers want to read posts aggregated in virtual networks?

1 comment:

  1. You get a bunch of people in a network like that, with a common RSS feed, you have a chance to get aggregated on scienceblogging.org ;-)

    ReplyDelete