This is an old idea of mine that could be implemented with N2NMs - similar to Syndie but with an F2F distribution mechanism.
A journal is a series of articles signed with the author's private key. The articles in the journal may be written by the user or reposted from other journals, either manually or automatically (syndication). When a user writes or reposts an article it's sent to her online friends and queued for her offline friends. Articles can be marked 'friends only', in which case they should never be reposted, but obviously this can't be enforced - you just have to trust your friends. A user who reads a reposted article and wants to subscribe to the author's journal (to read and/or syndicate it) sends a subscription request to the friend in whose journal she read the article. If the friend is already subscribed to the requested journal, she forwards subsequent articles to the requester. If the friend reposted an individual article but doesn't subscribe to the journal herself, she can forward the request to the friend in whose journal she read the article, and so on. (Requests to offline users are queued.) Eventually the publisher or a subscriber will be found and the new subscription path can be established. Any thoughts? Cheers, Michael
