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OK, so the following links are going to point to “mock ups” of what I have been trying to talk about. When I say “”, I mean (read as, “They suck”). Got that? Think of them as wireframes or storyboards, not anything like how the real deal would look or even interact. I am just trying to get a high-level conceptual demo going so that those of you who don’t do well with words-only descriptions of things can see a bit more of what I am talking about.
So, the first place a person would probably find via a search engine (let’s say we’re targeting search engine optimization, or “SEO”, around searching for a given city/town name and “volunteer” or “volunteering”) would be a page describing the local M6M effort for that city/town and giving them a chance to subscribe to a feed for all the events. There would also be a main directory page (most likely searchable, not static as shown) that would allow someone to drill down to the local M6M page.
The only really interesting thing on that first page is the link to the feed. While it only supports RSS-only feeds for now (feedburner, now a Google property, would get me email - still working on the SMS part) it does show the “one feed to rule them all” principle, given that the feed is aggregating feeds from a Google Group, a Blogger blog and a Google Calendar. And if Google Page Creator allowed embedded JavaScript then I could have a summary of all the posts showing on the local M6M effort page above, too.
But here’s the thing that’s hit me - the “one feed” principle (which is actually three feeds in one - RSS, email and SMS - a “trinity” of feeds if I can say that without being sacrilegious), that is, something that can aggregate any number of posts from any number of sites, . Because that allows . This throws the rest of my worries about a “platform” or an app right out the window!
For example, I recently posted about Page2RSS, a service that monitors feedless Web pages and generates an RSS feed for when they change. So for some churches or organizations they may already be posting volunteer information on their Web pages, just without a feed. Fine, keep it up. Other organizations may be blogging about it. Fine, keep it up. Some may have a Google calendard, Yahoo! or Google groups, Twitter, Facebook or Myspace or MyChurch pages to advertise such things. Fine, keep it up. Don’t change you’re doing. Don’t repost information simply to get it on M6M. Instead, you would simply the Web pages that denote your volunteer efforts with M6M and all M6M would do is make sure it is published via an aggregating feed for your area.
That idea is so simple! I like it .
I have set up a prototype of that, referenced in the first page linked to above. It uses Google Reader’s feature to allow you to tag various feeds you’ve subscribed to (basically making them into a folder) and then share that folder so that becomes available as a feed - a feed aggragator available as a feed. So the concept works. But now what I want is that last bit - I want email subscriptions (both individual and digest modes), SMS subscriptions plus the ability to show them all on a dynamic basis on a Web page (see the sidebar at the test blog, which is using a widget that is feeding off the Google Reader link). That part is so that people searching the Web have yet another way to stumble across the information, plus some people are still just more comfortable Web surfing for things than they are with feeds, email subscriptions, etc.
So now I’m off on a new search for such a feed aggregator/publisher. But hopefully this search is a simpler one than trying to find a whole platform that does what I want. And if I can’t find what I want then I just may write that myself, because it’s smaller than a whole platform and it would be fun.
Comment away.
google page creator
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