On 11 May 2005, at 22:16, Sebastien Arbogast wrote:
What do you call "folksonomy" exactly ? Do you mean "tagging" ?
* Mailing lists similarly could benefit from tagging, with tags like "How do I?", "Worked for me", "Useful" etc.
Personally I think of mailing lists as really old-fashioned ways of communicate, all the more so as they are more and more often "attacked" by spam filters and as there is no way to moderate them and assess contributors' participation. That's why I don't really understand the reason why so many Open Source projects continue to use them instead of forums. It's so easy to use, so much easier to moderate and there are very few technical problems like spam blocking. Moreover it's much easier to force people to use tags as you suggest. So I totally agree with your idea but I don't think mailing lists are really adapted for that. I'm aware of data storage issues (there must be a database somewhere and it can rapidly grow in volume and we have to manage backups but I think it's really worth the investment).
I completely agree. My "online community of the month" is the Drupal community itself (see http://drupal.org). As on planetcocoon the mailing list is a forum, but vice versa, any posts made to the forum are also sent to the mailing list. The best of both worlds. Planetcocoon offers a way for those of us who prefer forums to also be the recipients of the nuggets found in the mailing lists too (I also like XML feeds better than email). The folksonomy bit (yes, tagging) comes in to play in the context of the forum. People will be able to browse the forum, tagging information as they see fit. This functionality is more or less already here in Drupal.
* Let's make our examples, tutorials and recipes into psuedo-unit tests.
This way we can automatically tell whether an example is still relevant
or not, as Cocoon evolves. Code samples could be generated automatically
from the code itself to avoid cut and paste errors.
This is definitely an excellent idea. But I don't know of any pre-built system which manages to do such things. So we would have to do our own, which is not a problem because I'm currently working on a Cocoon-based management system which could easily be adapted for that through the development of a custom module.
Fabulous. I love the idea of automating as much as possible to remove error. Keep me posted.
Sebastien, with respect to influential individuals, I think you are already having plenty of influence in the best possible way! Keep up the great work. On a list like this you can never tell whether your ideas are landing in fertile soil or disappearing into the big Google in the sky. I know I have to often remind myself that silence doesn't necessarily indicate disapproval. Not always easy to remember. I for one missed your "Changing course" post (I don't know how), and I'm reading the list all the time!
Cheers, Mark
