Drupal as a node in a blogging community

Posted by cel4145 on May 4, 2003 at 5:29am

I was thinking about the recent post on the expanded capabilities of the import.module in CVS. I believe, and tell me if I'm wrong, these changes will allow Drupal to act as a blog hub, a central node in a blogging community operating quite differently from current community weblogs. It may be that the developers have imagined this already, but I've written an extensive description with some analysis that could be informative. If I'm right, there are many potential advantages:

The blog hub, then, is a specialized archive for a community of bloggers which reduces the load of blogging everything to an individual's blogsite; cuts down on aggregation reading; still allows for everything of importance to be "captured" by a researcher/enthusiast; increases community interaction through centralized commenting; acts as a focal point for collaborative projects, from software production to teaching a class; and, as a collected community archive, works as an entry point for people new to or with a sudden interest in a given field.

Read the full explanation with the configuration description, A Blog Hub: Using Drupal to Create a Better Community Weblog.

Comments

So sad...

Posted by Anonymous on May 4, 2003 at 3:57pm

metablog is registered. Interesting idea!

I've always been interested in setting up my own blog, but I haven't seen the point when I can create my own diary at k5 or participate in conversations at MeFi.

However, this idea seems to be a nice compromise between having a single blog for one person and having a community. In fact, isn't it more of a community than a site like MeFi considering each individual really does have his/her own blog.

So sad...

Posted by cel4145 on May 4, 2003 at 5:00pm

First, why so sad?

Second, the advantage would be that a Drupal-based site like k5 could also collect feeds from users for diary entries, then display those as a category listing on a seperate diaries page. And similarly, trusted Metafilter members would shoot their content directly to the main page; newer members could fall into a different feed category which would display a new user contribution page where Metafilter editors could pick and choose for upgrading to the main page, much like Drupal development does with the forums here.

So you are right. The individual blog site becomes the main source of producing all blog posts for any community site in which the individual is a member. Personally, I'm looking forward to installing the new version of Drupal once it is complete. For about a year, as an editor of Kairosnews, I only posted to Kairosnews (which runs on PostNuke). Recently, I started my own site (using Drupal) so that I could post things which were not germane to Kairosnews discussions. Now I have to blog twice if it's something that I want to put on my personal blog site and on Kairosnews. Using this model, I can merely shoot content to the main page from my personal site.

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Charlie Lowe | cyberdash
Tips for posting to the Drupal forums

re: So sad

Posted by cel4145 on May 4, 2003 at 5:01pm

I think I'm clueless today after brainstorming the blog hub idea last night Only local images are allowed.

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Charlie Lowe | cyberdash
Tips for posting to the Drupal forums

Discussion at Ed Tech Dev

Posted by Dries on May 6, 2003 at 8:32am