So, I’ve been considering finishing up and releasing Project Threadnaught.
Threadnaught is a category aggregation system for weblogs, using existing technology to bring weblogs together. Okay, so far, so space age. How does it do it?
I set up a taxonomy of possible categories, probably based on the Library of Congress or DMOZ or something (I was working on basing on the Dewey Decimal System, but having spent a couple of months in corespondance with the company who own the name I don’t really want to risk having any more to do with them. I can, apparently, use the DDC, providing I never use that name. Arseoles to the lot of them).
When someone makes a weblog post about that subject (Say, Cat Pictures) they send a trackback or pingback to http://altru.istic.net/threadnaught/ping/pictures/personal/pet/cats/ky00t and J. Random Blogger, who subscribed to the RSS feed at ttp://altru.istic.net/threadnaught/rss/pictures/personal/pet/cats/ky00t, and who only cares about the really, really ky00t cat pictures sees that it’s happened.
That’s the basic idea. This came about with etcon a while back, where someone set up a place to trackback, and anyone talking about etcon would trackback that, and people who cared could follow it.
And I’ve spent large parts of today (When I’m not installing Linux on the new laptop) considering this again, as I have been for the past few years or so. And I finally decide to write all these ideas up as a weblog posting before I start coding on this…
…and find that Internet Topic Exchange has been doing this exact idea for the last two years.
I need to act faster on these ideas.