cam . # .

troppo, quiggin and surfdom link to us: Surfdom seems to the largest and most consistent of the referrers. Australia is also fortunate that it doesn\'t have a super-crowded MSM all shouting the same thing. And the AU blogs tend to be of very high quality. Again it is not a super-crowded space, and it is a small enough group of commenters that it can reward quality without hiding in undiscriminating tribalism.

But that ain\'t gonna get us to abundance.

So Scrymarch and yourself have both had the idea of scraping a MSM publication using their own RSS feed and setting it up for comments. \"SMHTracker.com\" would probably get me sued, but some other name wont.

I can put up a scoop installation that does that. I woudl suggest we dont scrape the op-eds, and instead supply our own op-eds. lol. Use their AP/Rueters feed, but not the bad parts of their paper.

We also need a meta-form of mojo that determines when a user is speakign with authority and when they are speaking out of their arse. Maybe it is better if that is a social effect rather than a technologicial one. People earn that over time, rather than with moderation clicks.

So the cloud is the next thing. You suggested RSS for the comment threads to get it pageranked up. The inter-connected part is hard, but we already do it pretty viciously. People link in their blog posts, there are blogrolls, rss feeds, commenters sigs have links to their URL/blog.

Maybe there is some social effect here. Maybe people arent embracing the cloud because they havent time or interest. Maybe they arent embracing the cloud because the technology is inhibiting them.

Anyway I will set up an \"SMHTracker\" scoop site this weekend and we can start playing with, and trying out technologies, that may create - the cloud - the swarm - the flash-mob!

cam