Phillip Pearson - web + electronics notes

tech notes and web hackery from a new zealander who was vaguely useful on the web back in 2002 (see: python community server, the blogging ecosystem, the new zealand coffee review, the internet topic exchange).

2002-10-18

Looking at LiveTopics

What is liveTopics? It's a Radio tool by Matt Mower that lets you categorise your weblog in a much more granular way than with categories.

For example, here is Matt's page of topics starting with the letter 'T' (with the 'topics' topic expanded).

On the right hand side of the blog, you can see a list of topics, ranked by number of posts.

Another one: XFML

More on data formats in a comment by Matt Mower on the previous post. He mentions XFML, a subset of the topic maps mentioned there.

Here's an example, from XFML's creator's weblog. It reminds me of the RDF used by TrackBack, except without all the RDF (sort of like RSS 2.0 as opposed to RSS 1.0).

It looks like there has already been a bit of duplication going on in this area. LiveTopics uses XFML and TrackBack uses RDF.

Oh well ... plenty of standards to choose from ;-)
... more like this: [, , ]

Further connections

Just discovered that Matt Mower picked up on Seb's original idea too. He notes that it sounds like his original 'BlogPlex Server' idea, which lead to the creation of LiveTopics.

Also, Danny Ayers dropped in (to the Wiki) yesterday to say that there is a connection between this and Topic Maps, which I've never heard of. He also mentions that there is an ISO standard (XTM). Wow. Luckily, it has a "gentle introduction" ;-)