November 12th, 2008 by Kyle Maxwell
Forums essentially descend directly from the “ancient” bulletin board systems, in many ways the original social networking applications (other than email). But most of them don’t take full advantage of everything we’ve learned or implement common features from other social applications.
I spend a lot of time on a specific community that primarily uses a forum (SMF in this particular case) for almost everything. Many communities use these applications as sot of a “poor man’s CMS”, particularly as the community organizers and leaders don’t necessarily have a great deal of expertise in web applications or system administration. While a number of applications (bbpress, Google Groups, etc.) do have support for some of these mechanisms, I’d particularly appreciate a third-party indexer that builds upon existing sites, maybe through scraping.
The mechanisms I want to see
- Share out comments I’ve written into my lifestream. Some of my posts on forums I frequent really don’t have a lot of value, but some of them took a lot of thought and concern.
- Follow comments from my friends. Other indivdual posters frequently have intelligent, thoughtful posts in threads or sub-forums I don’t normally read, and I’d like to subscribe to their posts.
- Find other forums where my friends participate; after all, if we spend a lot of time interacting with them in one context, we likely share interests and potential friends.
- Search across forums similar to how Google enables us to search across blogs. Currently, forum posts do get indexed but a special “forum search” would help lead to #2 and #3 (particularly if it had an API).
July 9th, 2008 by Kyle Maxwell
Chrome Bits is on Twitter now. Follow chromebits for quick thoughts and conversation on science fiction, MMORPGs, and roleplaying.
December 8th, 2007 by Kyle Maxwell
I recently re-read Pattern Recognition by William Gibson, and then its sequel Spook Country. The first is an outstanding foray into modern life on the Net, complete with lots of discussion of 21st-century marketing, 9/11, and Internet forums. The protagonist, Cayce, is a fairly sympathetic character but most of the rest have layers of complexity that hint at all sorts of other doings that would be interesting. Although at this point it’s a few years old, it’s still well worth reading.
The sequel takes some of those other doings and examines them. Unfortunately, it follows a “zipper story” structure of separately following three different people (or groups of people) until they get to the big finale where they all come together in an odd way. It was quite disappointing, as the Clancy-like structure made it difficult to really get into the heads of any of the characters, and the closest thing the novel has to a protagonist never really engages the audience. The climax of the book is the most in-depth and developed pun I’ve ever run across in my life, but to say more would be to ruin the best thing about it.
Neither book is classically SF, as it’s focused more on examining technological changes already occurring. Gibson seems to be pointing out that we’re already in the “future” about which so much has been written, and while there’s a lot of very up-to-date culture and tech there, all of it is examined with the eye of someone who wants to perceive it in context, rather than “gee-whiz-cool!”
Recommended.
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