Aggregation On The Client

Problem

• It's difficult for readers to follow up on many potentially interesting on-line forums. Even if InformationOverload is not the problem (you won't get too much daily updates from forums like LambdaTheUltimate or HaskellWiki, but they're too many potentially useful places to keep track of.
• It's difficult for contributors to participate in all seriousness to more than one on-line forum.
• One kind of solution would be for aggregation of content to be done on the server by content createors through a "federation of wiki" schemes -- a proposed one is InterWikiCharter. Some contributors would not like that. One sends an article to publication X and it ends up being in publication Y, under a set of circumstances maybe altogether unacceptable for the author. To illustrate this, most people that contribute quality content to C2 do it based on the fact that for them WardCunningham is an absolutely trustworthy person. If that content would then end up on a site run by say, RA, that would not be quite what people would want.

Solution

Aggregation should be done on the client-side. This would allow a contributor or a reader to be able to follow say advocacy of atheism AtheismWiki_, and CommonLisp on CLiki. Because it's one's private space this would not impact negatively any of the online forums, and it would not suffer the potential problems of the InterWikiCharter. People would opt-in to whatever they feel like it is useful for them.

This approach has not quite been implemented yet, although RSS RecentChanges are a step in this direction. I am currently using this in MozillaThunderbird and it's some approximation of where this should go in the future. For most of the sites (including C2) the content of the updates is unsatisfactory, a notable exception being LambdaTheUltimate.