Curiouser and Curiouser!

Israel continues offensive despite outcry [Salon.com]

I'm sick and tired of this whole damn species.  Come friendly asteroid end my pain.

More on Topic-Sharing Community.

There's already been a great response to my post last night (see the comments to previous entry). Greg suggested his aggregator Blogdigger could be included in this - I agree! Matt and Andrew also posted very thoughtful responses.

Here's some of my feedback (copied from the comments - I must get these enabled inline...):

Overnight while pondering my post (which I regard as just a 'starter for 10' btw, not a final solution by any means), I did conclude that KC essentially already does what I describe - polls registered RSS feeds with ENT in them and aggregates them. It would be great if TE also had that functionality.

It's the client ping that I think is unnecessary and possibly holding back community uptake - with TE the ping is a manual process for the blogger, and with KC you need to install an add-on tool to enable the pinging. Both require too much manual effort for the blogger (IMHO of course). eg Bloglines does all its aggregation automatically (every hour I think), with no pinging required from the blogger.

Although Andrew I take your point about bandwidth utilization. But if Bloglines (and Blogdigger) can do it, why not KC and TE?

[Read/Write Web]

There seems to be some confusion about how K-Collector server works and the role of the K-Collector client so I thought I would try and give an explanation of how things fit together.

The first thing to understand is that you absolutely do not need the K-Collector client for your blog to be part of a K-Collector site. The client offers a set of benefits aimed at improving the experience for the user, but they are entirely optional. We currently aggregate many feeds to the W4 site which are not using one of our clients.

There are three reasons why we think using the client is beneficial:

1) The ping (it's the least important, but seems most misunderstood so I'll cover it first)

The K-Collector server contains an aggregator which reads all feeds on a rotating basis. It aims to read each feed more or less once per hour but this isn't guaranteed. It collects posts from feeds and assigns them to topics using either ENT metadata supplied in the feed or choices which are auto-discovered using various word-stemming and matching techniques.

This all happens entirely independent of the client ping. All the ping does is to move your feed up the list so that new posts you have written are likely to be collected sooner. If you don't ping the server just reads your feed automatically a little later on, that's all.

2) The topic manager

Through the client, the topic manager is integrated into the blog editing process and gives authors the ability to assign community topics to their posts as well as being able to create new topics. The topic manager also attempts to suggest topics which may be relevant to the content of the post to make choosing topics easier.

Without the client you have no way to decide which topics should be assigned to each post. In this case the server will, when it reads the feed, use it's own automatcher to automatically assign those topics it thinks are relevant.

3) ENT feeds

Where the author has choosen topics in the topic manager the client adds the appropriate ENT metadata to the outgoing RSS feed. K-Collector can then use this metadata to accurately assign posts to topics.

In summary the K-Collector client offers what we think are very useful benefits to weblog authors, however it is entirely optional and you do not need it for you weblog to be part of a K-Collector site. Equivalently K-Collector itself only cares about RSS.  It doesn't care whether ENT metadata was created by our client or some other application, we're completely agnostic about that.

I hope this goes some way to clearing up how the K-Collector system works.