Thoughts on Portals and Blogs

Here I a few thoughts gathered while discussing portals and blogs on TecfaSEED:

Idea of a blog/portal publishing tool:
- The ultimate goal of “Tell a portal” could be described as “Write once, publish everywhere”. Meaning a contribution (article) written on a [we-]blog/portal can be published in another [we-]blog/portal. The owner keeping full ownership of his contribution (keep the article on his personal blog or simply on his PC/PDA, …).
- It is based on the idea the we live in individualistic societies where people want to be noticed (if not rewarded) and want to be able to keep ownership of their contributions (e.g. to keep as centralized personal knowledge base).
- Use of trackbacks to follow discussion on multiple sites
- In some ways, freelance journalists and editorialists already work in such way (write an editorial which is published in several papers).
- one-does-it-all portal application need to be nuked and be replaced by distributed portals i.e. a portal should only be a thin layer/proxy which aggregates content and tools.
- I believe that a portal like TecfaSEED needs more personal contribution/thoughts and not only “hey I have seen this and go test it yourself” kind of post. Personal contributions are found in weblogs.
- Use of a cache to store distributed content

Drawbacks
- Editing needs to be synchronized across multiple sites
- Might be harder to build communities if contributors do not even dare connecting to portals

Portal and blog contributors/communities:
- I believe people writing in portals do it mainly when they become community leaders and start to “own” the virtual place. From that point of view I do not think they are less egomaniac and more sharing-oriented than personal bloggers. People do not heavy contribute outside of their sphere of ownership. Nico did not agree with that statement and replied “check slashdot.org and count the number of “anonymous coward” who posts comments !!!!”

Reasons tro write in my blog first (and then maybe post somewhere else):
- full ownership of my contribution (my writings won”t disappear when a third person decides so… what happens if the TecfaSEED community dies and the activity is stopped on the portal)
- some sort of personal knowledge management (caterorized, sortable, searchable)
- centralized way to keep track of my thoughts
- self-creation of my own community (links, blogroll, trackbacks)
- a proof of some of my knowledge/contributions to a future employer

My own terms to describe both communities:
Blog: self-centered, evolving (based on bursts) individual-centered
Portal: “anchored”, topic-centered

An paper on the evolution of the Blogspace: “On the Bursty Evolution of Blogspace“