Library clips

Solution Watch has a write up on the new tag-based forums, Vennt (private release only).

Thanks to Brian’s screenshots we get a glimpse of what’s going on…so instead of forums as a pivot for discussion it is around tags.
When you sign up your interests are tags, you can see posts with these tags…so is this a de-centralised discussion forum.

Old School
- Set up a forum
- Obey the owner and the rules
- Become a participant
- Post a topic
- Reply to topics
- Displays a thread
- no feeds

Web2.0 version
- You are your own person, you are not explicitly a member of a forum
- Write a post and tag it, now it will be the latest post within that tag (no owner, no rules, no join-up)
- Or search for a tag and then write a post within this tag (forum)
- This way you can write posts to heaps of forums (or should I say tags)…I wonder if one post can be posted to multiple tags (I think you can)
- I wonder if you can select multiple tags and see a river of news posts

How cool, just surf all day writing posts for tags (forums)
…since it is a tagging system you can view users, tag clouds, etc…there must also be a way to track replies to posts you have made, kind of like an inbox (or RSS feeds).

The great thing about tag systems is usually for each tag you can see related tags (discover similar forums), and for each post you may be able to see other tags this post also appears in…great for discovering other forums and users.

You user space can be your blog post stream and each forum is a category for your posts, but all within a social tagging environment (I’m not using the term “folksonomy” because I’m not sure if you can tag each other posts, ie. global tagging)

…wow, this is like Forum World, every tag is a topic, bounce around and discuss!

More

Brian also points to Talkinghub, this lacks a user space (post anonymously by default)…but it seems to be similar to Vennt, so it’s worth a play in the meantime.
Notice their blog is simply a tag
…this wouldn’t work well as I could just start posting any type of content with that tag and ruin it for them…a user space is essential.

Another pointer is to SayOutLoud, this is a much more polished interface, here is an example of a post.
For each post you can bookmark it, memedigg it, email it, reply with a comment, grab the feed, click to the topic poster and commentors user spaces, and discover (browse the tags, posts related by tag, users who replied to this topic also replied to…)
It would be good if you could view tags at the user level, and if the user space had it’s own tag cloud.

I posted on the idea of blog-based tagging services a while back, see Tagsurf: tag-based forum.

[ADDED 26/06/06: Blogoforum]

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