No, that's not a mischosen Subject, and this is not an actual "lazyweb" request. Just reporting a lazyweb-friendly project I just discovered, that was IMHO a nifty idea. Unfortunately, it "was", because as detailed in
Why do I think that the idea is so cool? Well, because every now and again I do have questions and ideas of my own, for something too many orders of magnitude above the level of my current technical skills for me to even think about developing them to put the thing to work. But if by any chance I feel inspired and write about it in an OT entry in a community that is at least vaguely related, it either gets unanswered at all, leaving me with Warnock or gets an explicit reply along the lines of: go get the skills and do it. Also, there may well be a community where discussing the issue may be appropriate, but one may simply not know about it. Thus a service like that offered by that site, would be useful in these circumstances.
So, why did the project fail? Well, I don't have the slightest idea. But judging from the last entries, perhaps it was too broad in scope. Moreover, I suppose that it would have greatly benefited from not being a new thing altogether, but a side project of some major information site.
My take on this is Lazyweb becomes a message board to which messages are posted automatically whenever a modern blog links to it (via the ping magic). That seems like a great idea... a lazy way for blogs to post messages on a particular topic to a central message board on that topic.
Then, would the blog author need to check the Lazyweb comments from time to time?
I guess the ideal way for a person to post an answer would be for the person to click over to the blog author's question in his blog item, and post a comment (an answer) to that item.
Is this how you see it working?
The part that's not clear to me (the value of it, I mean) is the software creator's idea to use Lazyweb.com as a place for blog authors to post questions about anything at all... sorta a Usenet about Everything. That would seem to be a hard sell to prospective readers, even if RSS feeds were incorporated... "Hey, world; monitor this site for questions about all kinds of stuff that you might be able to answer."
AIUI FWIW
blazar on 2007-04-11T19:58:38
Please note that I have virtually no experience with blogs and the like, so I'm not terribly familiar with their specific jargon, let alone the technology. Said this...
Then, would the blog author need to check the Lazyweb comments from time to time?I'm not really sure. Since the Lazyweb provides feeds anyway, I suppose he would use them to keep track of possible comments. But the Lazyweb also provides a quick means, in the form of a single link for anyone who reads a particular entry, to the original post, and I suspect that if one is really interested in answering then he/she would probably also post a comment in reply to it, in the original blog. (Or else, would the trackback mechanism take care of acknowledging that? I don't have the slightest idea...)
Is this how you see it working?AIUI FWIW yep. With the caveats above!
The part that's not clear to me (the value of it, I mean) is the software creator's idea to use Lazyweb.com as a place for blog authors to post questions about anything at all... sorta a Usenet about Everything. That would seem to be a hard sell to prospective readers, even if RSS feeds were incorporated... "Hey, world; monitor this site for questions about all kinds of stuff that you might be able to answer."Yep, this is exactly what I meant when I suggested it may have been "too broad in scope": that is, unreasonably ambitious? People still do have specific interests! Perhaps tags could take care of this aspect, or at least aid, but it's not entirely clear to me if they were/are even provided by the Lazyweb mechanism.
By converting the Lazyweb home page to an RSS feed, Lazyweb creates a poor man's Bloglines... people who are interested in the topic covered by a particular Lazyweb can subscribe to the feed and monitor questions (or feature requests or whatever) posted there. So I guess one would ask blog authors to cooperate in providing content to the aggregate feed by linking to the Lazyweb in any blog post that concerns the topic covered by the particular Lazyweb.
/me learning more
blazar on 2007-04-11T20:39:28
Thank you for the link. As explained in the reply to your other post, I'm far from being an expert myself. (About anything, BTW!) So I'm reading it. I think that the keyphrases are:
More people can describe features than write software, just as more people can characterize bugs than fix them. Unlike debugging, however, a LazyWeb description does not necessarily have a target application or a target group of developers.But when we read the following...
Will it work? Who knows. Like any experiment, it could die from inactivity. It could also be swamped by a flood of low-quality submissions....we now know that it didn't work. However the matter is: will this be the last word?
Re:/me learning more
davebaker on 2007-04-11T21:34:17
Heck, maybe it's basically a precursor to Technorati... where, I think, it's possible to see all recent entries for blogs that use a particular tag and that use software that has pinged Technorati. The way the Lazyweb author describes it, a blog author manually includes a simple hypertext link to the Lazyweb site in order for the new item to be aggregated to the Lazyweb. I wonder if it would be possible to rewrite the Lazyweb software to generate "new Lazywebs" automatically for each incoming link that includes a "?tag=" parameter in the URL. Then a person writing an item in his blog about mod_perl could specify mod_perl as the item's tag; the word "mod_perl" would appear in the list of tags for that item on the resulting HTML page for the item and would automatically be a link: "Tags for this item: <a href="http://perllazyweb.com?tag=mod_perl">mod_perl</a>"
If the Lazyweb spawned a new page/RSS feed for links to it about "mod_perl," it would be possible for people to subscribe to the "mod_perl" RSS feed.
(Perhaps I've just reinvented Technorati; maybe that's exactly how Technorati is pinged.)
In effect, each such tag would result in a different, community-written "Planet Perl" (http://planet.perl.org/) for each of the topics (tags) entered by people on their blog entries.
I'm not sure how this Changes the World as compared to message boards and Usenet, but the ability to have blog entries automatically appear on a single web page and RSS feed is cool, and if Lazyweb could be turbocharged as described above perhaps it would enable, in effect, the creation of new message boards and Usenet newsgroups on the fly, complete with an RSS feed for interested persons.
I wonder if software is available that enables the creation of a mini-Technorati.
use.perl journal entries don't include tags or automatic pings, but I guess they could...
