July 29, 2004

Shout out to the aggregators or How did I blog not from the convention?

Liza Sabater

I started the day with a false yet funny alarm from Opinions You Should Have

Although Kerry immediately realized his mistake and tried to "take back" his acceptance, a member of the Rules Committee informed him that there were "absolutely no take-backsies."

How did I get there? Without Technorati: politics.technorati.com, politics.feedster.com :: The Official DNC Bloggers, and DNC 2004 Weblogs: News Aggregator, I would have had a hard time following all the blogs.

Unfortunately to many, Xian's mad blogging at The Power of Many, Edgewise; our collaborative effort here at Radio Free Blogistan; as well as my own efforts at culturekitchen, had been absent from all of them until yesterday. I spent part of Tuesday and Wednesday chasing down email addresses for the aggregators and exchanging emails with their keepers. All's well that ends well.

Kudos and a big shout out to Dave Sifry who personally answered, within a few hours, my request to add the blogs to the Technorati: politics.technorati.com aggregator. Thanks also to Dave Winer[*] --I got hot and bothered over Conventionbloggers.com's lack of an email or comment form to handle omissions. Feedster is still missing in action, but I am sure they will be correcting these omissions soon --it's just been a crazy week. A last shout out to Eric Schnure and Brad Johnson of bostonDparty - 2004 Democratic National Convention Blog for adding us to their blogroll.

The moral of the story?

The technology of blogs-as-publishing-tools is fully mature. The technology of blogs-as-networking-and-affinity-tools is still in its infancy. Blogs won't get added to blogrolls unless you ask. In other words, good old fashioned hand-shaking and querying is still needed to make blogs work as networking tools. Still, it will be exciting to hear what insights, especially software developers, will get out of all this conventioneering. I am sure that new plug-ins and tools will be developed out of all this mad blogging.

UPDATE:
Edgewise and Power Of Many have been added to Conventionbloggers.com. Radio Free Blogistan is still missing in action.

Posted by liza at July 29, 2004 8:21 PM
Comments

At Feedster we made the [relatively arbitrary] decision to re-do our politics.feedster page based on the "Official" DNC bloggers who were given press credentials. We wrestled a lot with being more inclusive on that page but did not do so. One of the reasons is that the NYT was pointing at us intermittently as a digest of the "official DNC bloggers" and wanted to support that editorial decision on their end.

We're figuring out how to improve what we do for the RNC in a few weeks. Any input would be appreciated.

Posted by: Scott Rafer at July 30, 2004 8:53 AM
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