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The Collective vs. the Individual

Bill Simser has a point when complaining about the decentralised scattering of SharePoint resources. I know Fitz was planning to come up with a solution to this and we have talked about it a couple of times. Due to the busy schedules the last months we never got it started.

What I propose is a super RSS feed. Can we not create somewhere a Web service connecting to all of our blogs generating an RSS feed dedicated to SharePoint? Suppose that we all attach a well-defined set of categories to our postings (e.g. SharePoint utilities, Web Parts, ...) and this super RSS feed generator picks them up, filters and aggregates all of them so that people can use their favorite feedreader and have one central list to read. The generator should be intelligent so that it bundles together related postings and possibly also comments associated with it. We can then put a link to this feed on our blogs so that everybody can refer to it as being the place to go to to get the latest but also the archived postings regarding SharePoint. Nice idea or far fetched?

posted on Monday, June 27, 2005 8:14 PM

# re: The Collective vs. the Individual

We already have this in a small way. There is a rss feed that accumulates the blogs of several people.
The main problems are
a) I already get some of these people's blogs as RSS feeds (so I get their information again)
b) Some of their blogs I don't want to see.
The more blogs you have in a master site the more people you get that you think are wasting your time.
I waste people's time with "interesting" things about Finland now and then. Other people have moans about how they can't get to Tech Ed. The more people we get in such a super feed the more off-topic stuff there will be (and if the present individual blogs are anything to go by the more repeats of information about new articles (etc.) that have come out).
When I look at Bil's list two of them were already covered in the WSS FAQ. If someone sends me corrections (using Comments at wss.collutions.com) I do include them. Similarly if someone sends me a good FAQ item, I include that too. I'd include the *text* rather than just the links to some of those good blog items if I wasn't afraid that that would be seen as stealing. I'm only adding the links (to Non-MS Articles) to be a good citizen not because I really wouldn't like them on the site where they could be included in the index and thus be searchable in a way they are not now.
Mike

Posted @ 6/27/2005 9:01 PM

# re: The Collective vs. the Individual

Patrick Tisseghem

Yep, I we appreciate the work you are doing. But the RSS feed could be intelligent enough to aggregate only the interesting stuff that we as bloggers annotate with special categories.

Posted @ 6/27/2005 9:04 PM

# re: The Collective vs. the Individual

Hey Mike, I resemble that comment! (about moaning about TechEd).

Anyways, the RSS thing is an implementation and as Patrick points out could work if it was smart enough.

I do agree with Mike that there are somethings I don't want to see. I currently have about 30+ feeds from SharePoint bloggers but a) it's not just about blogging b) there are some bloggers who fall into the SharePoint realm but I don't read them as their primary blogs are not SharePoint and c) even the SharePoint bloggers don't always blog about just SharePoint.

I think the blogging is handled through current RSS feeds. What I'm more concerned are resource type lists. Things like the list of current SharePoint bloggers (nobody has a definitive one and when someone does publish one, someone is always omittted) or a list of tools or websites or whatever. That sort of thing is what I'm more interested in getting on top of and keeping alive through updates.

Posted @ 6/27/2005 9:24 PM

# re: The Collective vs. the Individual

In Outlook 2003, why not use use Newsgator and Search folders?

I use Newsgator to subscribe to a few thousand (literally) blogs and newsgroups and then use a search folder for each of the keywords I'm interested in e.g. SharePoint, Groove, migration, OpenCanal, etc.

Newsgator is well worth the money.

Michael.

Posted @ 6/27/2005 11:41 PM

# re: The Collective vs. the Individual

Mike Walsh Helsinki

I knew Bil would spot the TechEd reference ! Sorry, Bil, couldn't resist.

I suspect that if I offered Jopx (for instance) a SharePoint List at www.wssfaq.com (the only one of the two WSS FAQ sites I "control") that only he could update, he wouldn't want it but would prefer to keep updating his own blog with the latest version of his list.

Similarly Mark Krueger (spelling?) and his list.

There's a much bigger attraction to updating your own site/blog (whatever) than to updating the proposed neutral location ever would be.

I'd be afraid that by missing out the "my" aspect if we followed Bil's suggestion, we'd in time be getting poorer content. [I wouldn't be spending so much time updating WSS FAQ content if my name wasn't behind it ...)

Posted @ 6/28/2005 10:40 AM

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