Webcracy

This post was intended to be an email to the DiSo Google Group. I’m waiting for approval, admin if you’re listening, help

Oi pessoal,

This is Re: Activity Streams for DiSo
(http://groups.google.com/group/diso-project/browse_thread/thread/3bbea6556842bf20).

What do you guys think of using pingback/trackback technology for DiSo activity streams, citations, and eventually other stuff related to “pushing back and tracking information to a person”?

Let me explain a little further:

The idea would be to have a pingable profile/identity page with a standard URL that any app could ping/trackback to.

Use cases are multiple (some examples below) and today this kind of functionality seems to be achieved through some heavier coding (RSS/API scanning, bots, etc.) and unfortunate profile syndication in other “silos”, not through the use of lighter technology such as pingback/trackback and more open architectures such as wanted by DiSo.

Use cases:

• Activity stream: whenever I post something in a blog/platform, be it a comment or an actual post (but this could/should be anything, anywhere), that blog/platform pings back to said standard URL. My site can then produce an activity stream, for example.

• Citation tracking: whenever someone tags me in a photo/video, or cites me in any content, that can be pinged back as well.

• Well, we can then imagine and copy behaviors we like, from Facebook for example.

I’m pretty ignorant regarding Wordpress’s innards (today’s DiSo reality) and I’m not the technical type (though not technically ignorant), so I’m avoiding being specific.
It seems that, today and by default, Wordpress only processes pingbacks and trackbacks when you publish a post and not, for example, a comment (tested it). Furthermore, it seems that pingback/trackback’s use is pretty much restricted to the world of blogging.

Design patterns for the mentioned use cases are emerging from those sites who have gone through the background heavy-lifting (see below), altough I think that we can go further, namely in interaction design.
We could probably extend the typical pingback/trackback use to parse microformats but again, I prefer leaving that discussion open.

Here’s the link for the conversation that was taking place on the DiSo PIBB channel, for reference: http://archive.pibb.com/DiSo/General/4/84 (if the link doesn’t work well, it’s supposed to link to page 4, paragraph 84 of the channel’s history)

For some more reference, here are the pingback and trackback original specs, the Wordpress glossary entries (not much else to be found on the Wordpress doc. and I prefer to let you judge of community-made valid technical reference posts) and an example of how it seems fairly easy to write simple pingback/trackback plugins for other applications (here a Ruby on Rails-based blog, but I mean any kind of app):

• http://hixie.ch/specs/pingback/pingback
• http://www.sixapart.com/pronet/docs/trackback_spec
• http://codex.wordpress.org/Glossary#Pingback
• http://codex.wordpress.org/Glossary#Trackback
• http://theadmin.org/articles/2007/12/4/mephisto-trackback-library

There’s also facebook.com, soup.io, pulse.plaxo.com, Jaiku, friendfeed.com, readr.com and more.

I’m eager to hear your feedback.

Thank you Stephen for answering my Twitter call for help through ”#diso”

Cheers,

Alex

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