Mosaic gets at the idea of small pieces forming something bigger.

bitzi

I haven’t look tooo hard but I’ve only found stuff about spiders.

Cheers-
-Michael

Here’s a nice example from May 10:

07:30 PM Animaterra Women’s Chorus Concert Benefits AVEO (aveo)
07:30 PM Animaterra Women’s Chorus (eventful: Keene Unitarian Universalist Church)

When I first started seeing these kinds of duplicates, my instinct was to suppress them. But actually now I think that’d be wrong. It’s cool to see multiple sources reporting the same event. It demonstrates buzz, and triangulates on the event from different points of view.

In this case, the first entry comes from the aveo.org calendar which is (as of a few days ago) exporting iCal.

The second comes from Eventful:

http://eventful.com/events/keene/animaterra-womens-chorus-/E0-001-010080339-7#box-details

And it isn’t one of the events I’ve posted there to seed this process. It’s organic. The fact that it says “Posted by evdb” tells me it came not from a registered individual user, but rather from an Eventful partner site. Namely:

http://www.newhampshire.com/calendar/details.aspx?eventID=10339&eventDate=05/10/2008

This is a great example of kinds of network effects I’m trying to illustrate. Animaterra promoted their event to NewHampshire.com, which syndicated to Eventful, and from there to elmcity.info, and from there to citizenkeene.ning.com and potentially elsewhere.

Meanwhile AVEO, as a beneficiary of the event, promoted it on its own website, and that info was also syndicated, in this case directly to elmcity.info (and again, from there potentially elsewhere).

I want people to appreciate how things flow in syndication networks, how information can circulate without loss of fidelity, and why that’s such a powerful way to spread a message.

The right word may help, and syndication may finally be the right word. But as with blogging, you can’t really convey the network effects to people until they put some skin in the game, and experience them happening w/respect to their own stuff. Same here I think.

Best,
Chris.

Among other things I’m hoping that if this idea of syndication can be conveyed in another context, one that’s more familiar, less threatening, and highly utilitarian, then we could eventually bring things back around to blog-style syndication as well.

I am not keen on curation because of the heavy sense in which custodianship is part of that. I admit to checking a dictionary (well, Encarta’s), and discovered that curation is apparently a modern term or perhaps very specialized. It appears to be what curators do, and curators would appear to be control freaks (in a nice way, of course).

I should not have been surprised by return of the calendaring example, but I was. I thought that case was a form of aggregation with added requirement for coherence and the prospect of coordination. Maybe we are looking for a single term that would be seriously over-used if we charge it with all of the cases discussed here.

That’s step two. Step one is that, well, there really isn’t all that much calendar info out there, at least not in electronic form, and especially not in a syndicatable electronic form.

Seeding the combined calendar with lots of examples of what /could/ be provided, and then curated, is firstly a way to try to motivate the use of calendar-oriented software where currently what is mainly used, if anything, is wordprocessors and spreadsheets.

Yes. Collaborative and loosely-coupled curation. Problem is, people outside the geek world, who haven’t come to take that for granted, have no mental model for such a thing.

There’s all this calendar information for your town out there, and what this technology providies is the ability to make a one-stop calendar where you can bring it together. That’s what RSS and syndication enables.

To take another example, RSS enables all the blogs I read to be brought together in a one-stop blog reader.

We’ve been calling the process of combining such feeds aggregation/re-publishing, but in this light, perhaps it’s more apt to describe it as curation.