Mathemagenic

One of the directions that keep on popping up when I'm thinking about blogging in KM context is topic-based blogging. There are a couple of reasons behind it:

• personal - if blogs are used as a personal knowledge management tool than ability to tag posts is important to be able to organise, retrieve and share them
• corporate - once weblogs are used in a company one would want to be able to slice an aggregated stream of posts into topic-based streams to support knowledge sharing

liveTopics and k-collector are good examples of personal vs. corporate implementations (see also: liveTopics and k-collector compared) and del.icio.us is an example of connecting personal and shared views on topics together.

In this post I'd like to focus on personal side and describe what topic-based blogging functionalities one may want as a blogger. And because I'm very practical and selfish I'd describe it as my liveTopics wishlist :)

What liveTopics do now

• allow adding topics for every weblog posts - e.g. check this post via browser
• display a list of posts per topic - e.g. my posts about liveTopics
• display topics as a frequency list or recently updated list  - e.g. my topic index
• provide an interface for managing topics (renaming/deleting + backup + some settings)

My liveTopics wishlist

• Printing
  • I'd like to be able to print posts for a topic or combination of topics (so far I can think of AND/OR combinations, but may be I'd want more once related topics are there ;)
• Aggregation
  • Topics indication in my RSS feed (e.g. in ENT format)
  • RSS feed for each topic (ideally for a combination of topics as well :)
• Related topics
  • Indication of a relation (below are different overlapping! dimentions) 
    • Automatic vs. manual
      • Automatic: based on co-occurences in the same post - e.g. related tags for innovation at k-collector or del.icio.us
      • Manual: added by me to indicate how topics are related in my head - e.g. I'd like to be able to specify that blog communities is a narrower than communities, but also related to blog ecosystem 
    • Internal vs. external
      • Showing that my posts on blog communities are related to my del.icio.us link collection on blogCommunities
    • Me vs. others
      • Showing that my posts on innovation are related to post on innovation at k-collector
  • Inference
    • Once relations are there one can do all nice things with inference rules.
      • For example automatically including narrower topics when broader topics are selected, e.g. when someone selects communities posts on blog communities are shown as well even if they are not explicitly marked that way
• Visualising
  • Dynamics
    • I'd love to see how my use of topics changes over time; something similar to temporal rhythms of interactions with others visualised from email arhives
  • Relations between topics
    • Just a nice image :) Something like delicious mind
• Small liveTopics/Radio specific things
  • Shortcuts for topics added automatically
  • Expanding of posts by topic in topic index pages

Of course, I wonder how many of those things are "nice to have"/"Lilia specific" and which features would be used by many blogger, but this is a "further research direction" as I'd write in a paper :) 

I'm not a big fun of joining YASNs just for the sake of it, but my discovery of Plazes has a little story behind it.

I guess I heard about it first in a conversation about geotagging weblogs between Martin and Rick. Then I've got an invitation from Matt, registered, but was too lazy to install Plazes launcher that you need to make it work. Then the story took a funny twist. I was looking for a WiFi in Florence, found Ben's office at Plazes and as a results of some out-of-the-blue emailing had a pleasure of meeting Ben Hammersley. Today, reading about social networking and logging physical proximity in a paper by my colleague I thought of it and decided to give it a try. I guess my adoption process took around 1 month, so I wonder if I'd qualify as an early adopter :)

Anyway, I'm there now:

Once you are online and logged in Plazes show your location and allow you to see where are others. I guess it's interesting in several cases:

• knowing where are your friends (yes, it's YASN as well :)
• knowing who is at the same plaze - just think of the all great possibilities to meet new people at conferences and geeky encounters in cafes in strange cities :)
• knowing about interesting plazes around (including those with free WiFi) as you can search for plazes within different radius

I added it to my homepage and will see how it works... So far I added it to my home page. Not sure if I'll keep it there as it seems to make loading a bit slower (have to check it) and shows me plazeless from time to time. Anyway, it's still beta, so hopefully it will improve.

Features I'd love to see in the future:

• friends porting/discovery, so I don't have to struggle in one more YASN discovering which friends are there (btw, if you are there you can add me - I'm there as mathemagenic)
• ability to hide the exact plaze and show only the city where I am (because sometimes I want a bit of privacy :)
• calendar - ability to show my future plazes (e.g. travel plans), probably at the city level as well (because I can't know in advance specific locations I may be in

See also:

• Plazes blog
• reviews by Joi Ito, Ben Hammersley and Stowe Boyd 
• adoption graphs (those are really interesting :)