I have to admit that in so many ways I've got no clue about the Internet. So with what follows it's good to keep that in mind.

I really find Netvibes useful, but haven't played around with the public pages there. One of the things that's important is the use of widgets or gadgets. It's quite handy to have a gadget that brings in my Gmail, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook status updates, etc. on one page. But I must admit that I don't really use the site for drawing in my RSS Feeds.

Dave Pollard has written a couple of interesting posts on Goggle Wave. When I first saw the video demo of Google Wave my first thought was this is going make a big difference. Most of my meatspace friends still don't use social media very much and it seemed to me that Google Wave would cause a title wave of adoption. Phil Jones seems prescient about such things and doesn't think it will be adopted readily. I"m not sure what to think, except to think Google Wave is relevant to what you're thinking about.

Baconfile is a simple interface with Amazon S3. Ah the cloud...don't have a clue. Ethan Z has a post today about the future of African communications and it's interesting to see how the cloud fits into that story. Phil Jones has a very pithy post with relevant links to Dave Winer's River2.

Somewhere along the line someone is going to invent a system to aggregate whuffie or social capital across different sites. I don't see why the points here couldn't be somehow correlated to Technorati rankings and Ebay reputation scores. The beauty of aggregating across platforms is that I'm sure it would motivate people to produce more P2P.

I don't know about WordPress except that developers make zillions of apps for it. Something useful on Blogger blogs now is a Blog List. The cool thing is it's kind of like a RSS feed reader right in the blog. Most people use it to point to blogs they read. I'm terrible about keeping up with my blogs, but at Bazungubucks I use it to point to my Hats For Health, Thistlemoor and Incompetent Gardener blogs. Right now at your blog, and I suspect in the future, you have to manually copy stuff at your blog. But i"m sure there's a tool like the Blog List at Blogger for WordPress to automatically draw in RSS feeds to a sidebar widget.

I don't know how he does it but Gene Smith of Ignite Social Media has a fascinating page he calls a lifestream. He feeds activity at various sites like Last.FM and Delicious to his page as well as a sort of micro blogging feature. I don't know if this is something he invented or if he's using an off the shelf product. But in any case the page looks somewhat relevant to what you want to do.

I haven't found Friendfeed useful. I guess I just haven't played around much, but to be useful the stream would have to be sorted somehow. Michael Maranda likes PeopleBrowser. LOL I haven't figured out these sorts of tools for sorting your social graph, but clearly Twitter is driving quite a lot of innovation in this regard.

Wonderful tips, thank you John!

I completely agree about google wave and am anxious to see what it can do and how much of what happens with it can be made public. The lifestream link is very cool, but I want a bit more dialogue in evidence.

There is an RSS feed for both new discussions and comments to specific discussions at Ned - I wonder if anyone has ever tried to import them into a blog. I think I might give it a go.

RE: wordpress and blogger - I prefer the blogger interface for creating customized themes. WordPress is confusing to me. Given the googlewave thing and the unknown potential to integrate with that, I am wondering if it wouldn't be wiser to stick with the blogger software at internet4change instead of wordpress.

Opinions anyone?

So you already know I don't know much about the how to do computer stuff--lol. But my unimformed opinion is that WordPress actually is a better choice for you. It seems to me that WordPress makes it easier to make pages, that it's more like Web stie building software. Lars has used WordPress so beautifully on one of his sites.

Getting a link to pester Linda with I opened Chris Blattman's blog. He recently switched over to WordPress. There are several aspects of his new blog I like very much. The first is really simple, but important for a guy like me with a Swiss Cheese memory, and that's a simple search box. Something else of note is the element in the sidebar "My Shared Items Feed." I do think there are clever ways to use RSS feeds to facilitate conversations in multiple places.

You'll notice that he's using Carrington as a theme. I don't really understand frameworks, but Carrington might be something for you to check out.

Sorry to flood this thread with links. But I was just at Dan's Tutor Mentor blogspot blog and recalled his post earlier this month about their Web site redesign. It's useful even as a thought experiment if you missed it.

Something that I find a bit funny is how I keep running into people "I know" online in different places. I use the quotation marks because often times these are people from Onet and I don't really know them. It is interesting with over a trillion Web pages spidered by Google--the Internet is huge--how much like a small community the Web often feels.

John -- thx for the mention. My lifestream site was built using an app called Sweetcron (http://www.sweetcron.com/).

Hi Gene! Computer science is a discipline. Being utterly undisciplined, computer science is something I've avoided like plague. The Internet allows people like me to do stuff. The strange thing is it all seems a bit like magic to me.

Gene followed me on Delicious quite a while back. I never figured out the whole social aspect of Deliicous--a online bookmarking site. Still there's an aspect of the Web where common interest intersect and I ran into Gene Smith without making the Delicious connection.

Thank you Gene for all you have shared with me over the years. I've never told you how much it's added to my life, but say plenty.

I don't think my connection to Gene Smith without really connecting to him is all that uncommon. So something to consider when thinking about conversations at more than one site are ways to make connections more explicit.

One fantasy I have is something a little like the like button at Facebook that could be put across sites. I think the aggregate number of likes might be useful information as some rough indicator of whuffie or social capital. It also might be cool to have a link back to people who like your stuff.

On another subject, securing WordPress blogs, this page (a bit old) has five easy steps for making a WordPress site more secure. I particularly think the approaches for restricting the access to wp-admin folder useful. There are also some useful links from that article on WP security.

Hacking can be a tough problem. I like Keith Hart's The Memory Bank but know it's been hacked in the past. Ethan Zuckerman's blog has been hacked--don't think he uses WordPress. Even the very popular Talking Points Memo community pages have been spammed lately. They use a commercial package from Movable Type and the problem apparently is a hack.

There probably aren't any perfect platforms out there. The simple steps for security aren't perfect, but they do help. The simplest is just keeping software up to date is really all that simple: everything takes time. The open source community for WordPress in some ways makes it a good choice for security purposes for those without a computer science background.

I'm not sure that wordpress is actually going to do it for us... though wordpress should be able to integrate into the page if the user has a wordpress blog.

I think the way I see this is that there are so many tools and platforms out there... it's not realistic to assume that people are going to switch from blogger to wordpress to use a collaborative system, or that everyone who uses the collaborative system will have a twitter account. What I'd like to create is a page where all of the tools that one is using can come together in a dashboard-like way.

I've been playing with tumblr a bit (tho not very satisfactorily), which allows you to pull feeds from up to 5 sites into one blog-like format. Also ran across http://www.shiftspace.org/ recently - interesting, but I'm not quite sure I fully get it yet. Will have to dig in and start playing.

While it's not so hard to imagine a page that pulls links to all of the spaces we participate in together, one of the trickier things for me remains following the conversations that are taking place in those spaces.

If I have responded to a blog post, for example, I'd like to be notified when someone else responds without a) having to remember to look that blog up again or b) having to manage more email. Disqus is interesting for keeping track of my own comments on blogs, but doesn't let me know if more comments have been made after mine.

The challenge with following conversations at a space like Ned is that the RSS feeds here let us know when another discussion has opened w/in a group, but don't update us on activity within a conversation.

I wonder if anyone else is thinking about this?

Just some rambling thoughts...

Today I was reading a blog called Daisy's Dead Air. Ok there really is something related to this thread in that blog today, but as per my bad habit I'll go off course first.

I really value that particular blog because Daisy writes from Greenville, South Carolina where I spent some of my childhood. Also Daisy is a Red Neck Hippie and feminist who is about my age. Daisy is a bridge figure for me. Reading her blog I get directed to among other things what's happening in the feminist blogosphere. Of course I could go blundering in at other feminist blogs, but blundering is most often counter to my good intentions. I still blunder at Daisy's blog, but there's enough of an appreciation of goodwill that the conversation isn't destroyed.

The point of this thread is having conversations at more than one place, but pulling back a bit for a wider perspective, seems that you understand yourself, Christina, as a sort of bridge person--someone who links others who are separated by some distance. It's important to bring conversations at more than one place together precisely for bridge building.

Anyhow, Daisy's post today begins with a lament about keeping up with email. That reminded me of a post earlier in the month by dannah boyd. I was a bit shocked when I first read it that such an uber nerd as boyd would feel so bad about being inundated by information overload. But I also remember the comments being first rate. What I'd forgotten is a link in boyd's post which might be of interest to you. It's a dissertation Networking in Everyday Life by Bernard Hogan (PDF):

[T]his thesis reorients the focus towards a different question: under what conditions are alters accessible and how does multiple media use affect this accessibility? Rather than suggest that new media simply offer “more” social accessibility, I contend that they complicate social accessibility by offering individuals increasingly differentiated ways to habitually maintain contact with each other. The result of this differentiation is that while individuals might be able to maintain contact with more alters (or at least just as many) in the abstract sense, they end up maintaining contact with the most accessible alters rather than alters with whom one has the strongest ties. This is the conundrum of multiple media use: how is it that each individual medium offers increased convenience but the sum total of media use makes life less convenient, more planned and more complicated? I suggest it is because media use cuts across longstanding social norms of public and private spaces (or public and private time) without offering a coherent normative framework as a substitute. Instead, individuals are differentially accessible via each medium. Moreover, this accessibility is related more to emergent personal habits than to tie strength.

Part of the issue of conversations at more than one site isn't technical at all, but rather a problem of custom and norms. And in some way this construct of bridge figure. The tools play a part, but the nature of the different conversations--the places they're coming from--matters too.

IGNORE: Testing to see if http://cocomment.com works with discussions on ned

Took a lot of effort to find but http://cocomment.com is a bookmarklet tool that enables you to follow conversations on multiple sites. It also creates an RSS feed of the additional comments on those sites that you can import to any other site. Not sure yet how well it works - trying it out for a while to see. For those who don't have their own computer, apparently it also works from google desktop.

DISQUS provides some similar functionality. I don't unusually use Firefox so this has the advantage of not requiring a particular browser. Although I've not gone the step of actually making my blogs use it yet, so can't really say much about it.

Yeah I use disqus on the internet4change blog to modertate comments, but the difference is that disqus only seems to allow me to follow my conversations that are at blogs with disqus enabled. I can enable Cocomment on any site I participate in, including ned and social edge.

You experiment so we don't have to :-) I do appreciate you're offering the information on Disqus. It may be that I'm just a bit dense, but it always seems hard to get the information about these tools from their sites. For example I was wondering how Disqus is different from Cocomment and you've given me the answer.

In thinking about tools it seems worth mentioning Posterous. I don't use it, but I may well start playing around with it. I'm not sure that it really fits with your needs Christina, and hence the subject of this thread. But thinking about it, it struck me that Posterous is a really great tool as an interface to social media in places like Uganda. Many people have access to a computer, but have to go to a cafe to access the Internet. With Posterous you can update multiple sites--for example the title and some characters with a shortened URl at Twitter to a full blog post, and to Facebook, etc. all posted by email. So people can take their time to compose offline, go to the cafe to send the email and surf around while their at it.

Posterous is a cool tool.