After spending too much time thinking about some ideas I’ve had over the past few months, I’ve finally been able to devote a few weekends and late night into getting my blog aggregation site of the ground. After having some great chats during and after the Blog session back at PDC and more recently the Piedmont Bloggers Conference held in the fall, I’ve been motivated to get these great ideas into code before the upcoming Triangle Bloggers Conference being held in Chapel Hill, NC on February 12th. I tried testing some of the stuff behind closed doors, but I’ve decided that to build a set of tools to help build an online community, I really need to be able to test them out in an online community and have therefore opened the doors on OurWords.net.
This site is my experimental testing grounds for aggregating content form local blog sources in North Carolina and trying to develop ways to promote conversations and promote traffic toward sites. It is a work in progress, but I now have a decent framework in place to poll the local feeds and present the details in a variety of ways. I think the real challenge before is to provide more context and help bring together like conversations. Initially I have a number of ways to display aggregated feed contents, an area that I will be working on much more. I have a list of “most found” links in recent posts as well as a blog roll with recent post status details. I want to work much more on the searching capabilities and developing an engine to recognize hot topics and like conversations.
As I said, it’s a work in progress but I’m looking for feed back so check it out!