Great story: Zack Rosen up at the Dean campaign, working with Zephyr
Teachout’s inspiration and support, enlists and leads over a hundred open source
folks to create DeanSpace blogging
and organizing tools. This work has been ongoing, and getting
traction, but by the same token has been relatively undiscovered by the
broader blog universe. (Perhaps G*D wanted this ecosystem to
develop a bit before exposing it to the world). Among many other
things, Zack and puts
in an RSS feed capability that ping a site that Dave Winer had
constructed in the
distant past, as a kind of mate to weblogs.com. Dave this week was
moving weblogs.com from one server to another, and noted feeds with
“Dean” in them. Digging in, Dave discovers a whole world of
bloggers, at the net roots, using DeanSpace and conversing with each
other. Dave takes the RSS feeds and creates a dedicated
aggregator–turning these blogs into a Dean site–with all the richness
and complexity and humanity of the people involved.
Dave calls Zack and they discuss further ideas. The story goes
public at last night’s Berkman Thursday Night Meeting, where Dave demos, with Dean folks and others on video feeds, as well.
An fun story of simultaneous, distributed creativity, enabled
by standards (RSS–and soon, Zack tells me, FOAF), and resulting in new
experiences, new meetings among people, and new services.
And you and I
can now enjoy this site, Dean Community News, as well as meet the bloggers..
PS: A couple of corrections to the above, from Zack,
From: Zack Rosen
Date: Fri Dec 19, 2003 4:08:18 PM US/Eastern
To: Jim Moore
Subject: Jim, a couple corrections on your blog post
Hey Jim, read your blog entry – a couple things.
> Great story: Zack Rosen up at the Dean campaign, working with
Zephyr Teachout’s inspiration and support, enlists and leads over a
hundred open
> source folks to create DeanSpace
DeanSpace came entirely out of the grassroots. It was a feew
months into development / design that the campaign (zephyr) got
involved. I am not “the leader”, nor am I DeanSpace’s MVP.
We are pretty informal, and fluous and I have no real authority over
the project.
> Among many other things, Zack and puts in an RSS feed capability
that ping a site that Dave Winer
This is not true. I didn’t put the pinging capabilities into DeanSpace, the Drupal dev’s did a while back.
-Zack
