Marc's Voice
Home LANs + Broadband + Devices

Topics:

Work has begun on this area - this is basically the Internet Topic Exchange (ITE) that Phil Pearson has created.  Congrats to Phil for this timely work.

I first became involved with Topics - when I learned about Matt Mower's LiveTopics Radio add-on tool.  I had been looking for something equivalent to what Moveable Type users had - and Matt's code was - right on!  I finally had a way to index and categorize all my posts - exactly the way I wanted to do it - with topic keywords.

Matt told me of his 'knowledge management' desires and how Topics were an anchor in a sea of chaos and fragmentation.  Matt's code will hopefully soon be compatible with Phil's ITE - and THEN we need to make sure it ties into MT's topics - as well.

This was actually an early instance when I began to see that a mesh of standards was possible.  If we could plug-in topics into Radio, why couldn't we plug-in media management, messaging or new kinds of 'micro-content'?   If we can do that - then there's gonna be a bunch of new wyas for us to interact and connect tgoether - besides just linking.

The ITE totally fits into the rest of this Open Architecture and grasps the intrinsic spirit of this design.  Matt's efforts to flow topics through RSS is also crucial.

By having a way for blogs and on-line communites to anchor their conversations, knowledge management and galleries via topics, incredible new services and applications will become real.

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