Library clips

Reading Luis’s post got me to take another look at Ziki (which I’ve been following since its inception and are doing quite well considering the onslaught of lifestream services).

Luis mentioned Ziki Groups (which I had forgotten about), in Ziki you personally have a network (your friends), and a company can join as their own user space, further to this several members (company or people) can come together to form a group lifestream user space.

Ziki groups is the perfect example of grouping data into something meaningful…if the new web is individual centric then what Ziki does is give you a homepage for your identity and content, from where you can network.
What’s cool about it is that Ziki is a social network itself, so you can add, message, and search friends…you can tag yourself and find others by tag, or by fielded search.
What I really like is that you can create groups or people slices of content without needing to really be a group, I mean without having a formal community.

How this is handy is that if a bunch of you blog and collect stuff on similar topics, join Ziki as individual, then create a group, and there will be one page where you can get updated on that group topic…all Ziki does is bring it together. Feedburner Networks brings like blogs together, but nowadays we don’t just blog, we bookmark, comment, etc…all Ziki Groups does is bring peoples lifestreams together on the one page.

In the end a group page looks like a user page only it’s populated by more than one member…what’s good is that you can get further context by viewing the group tagcloud.

I guess another way of seeing topic pages as a by product of the individual centric web, is going to the main ziki page and clicking on a tag.

Anyway, Communties are more work and committment, because the blogs are inhouse within the community, and the community has a name and the content has to be precise, etc…whereas I’d like to lifestream as usual and be part of lots of on-the-fly communities by slicing my data up.
When viewing the group tag cloud you could see my lifestream tag called “wiki” along with another 10 people with the same lifestream tag, this gives you many topic pages to browse within the group, all this with the members not even knowing they are contributing (well they do know, but they don’t have to change anything they do just because they are in this group/s)
You can have your cake an eat it to, the individual comes first, and as a by-product the data can be sliced up and spliced with others anyway to form new contexts with the same data.

Ziki Groups is bringing multiple lifestreams into the one stream, you can form a “web 2.0 not for profit” Ziki Group, where a bunch of people who blog, bookmark, comment, etc about this topic join Ziki, and then all join a Ziki Group for a one stop shop on that topic…browsing the group tag cloud would delve into more specific topics.

If you call the group “web 2.0 not for profit”, you have to accept that these members may blog and bookmark about off topic stuff, this issue is nothing new when splicing up topic pages, I think it’s worth putting up with compared to trying to create a community where people have to blog and talk about a focused topic. Firstly people have their own blogs, so the first hurdle is getting people to contribute, communities are hard these days, now that the individual can lifestream, making lifesteam topics isn’t always going to be clean topic content, but it’s something we have to deal with…
The benefit is bloggers and bookmarkers are doing it for themselves, we can splice them together after the fact using services like Ziki, and we have to put up with off topic stuff.
You can have one well made community on a topic, or from individual blogs you can splice heaps of topic networks that may be a bit “noisy” (off topic posts).

In respect to communities, this post is saying you can achieve a similar content scenario, but communities are their own distinct entity with valid purposes, goals, and drive, sometimes you need the committment, attention and focus of a community. Forums are usually the killer feature, along with Q&A, FAQ, document library, etc…communities have an agenda, whereas on-the-fly DIY topic networks are a few clicks of the button.

For more on communities and networks, see my post Blogs : the many ways “many” come together.

I mentioned before that you could explore the group tag cloud from a Ziki group and be updated for example on all things “wiki” from blogs, bookmarks, video’s, podcasts across 10 people…this is great value.

My idea is a step further, it’s to create a Ziki Group Topic Pages, where you could even make more precise topic based meta-lifestreams.
eg. people join a lifestream service, this service would not only give you a feed for each of the sources they input eg. blog feed, bookmark feed, video feed, etc…but it will also list all the tag feeds within each service.

Now you may want to make a topic lifestream on “ROI in KM”, so what you do is go to the people tag cloud to find those registered people who have tagged themselves as KM…good start.
Now you go to each person’s lifestream and build a topic lifestream feed of that person, ie. grab the blog category feed on ROI, their bookmark feed on ROI, their video’s on ROI, etc…once you have this built feed you input it into your topic lifestream space, then you go to other people and build the same feed.

When you are finished you will have a topic meta-lifestream page that you can filter by type eg. blog posts from these 10 people on ROI, bookmarks from these 10 people on ROI, etc…

Visitors could subscribe to this topic lifestream in their RSS Readers, or even just the bookmark portion, or just the blog portion.

I suppose an easier way of doing this is perhaps doing a search in a Ziki group and filter results by source type, and this is your on-the-fly Ziki Group Topic Page, but then this is just like browsing the group tag cloud.

Feedback

Another good thing about Ziki is that you can post content within Ziki itself, and you can choose a type for your content to live in eg. when you post content you can’t tag it, but you can file it as a post, bookmark, video, podcast, event, etc…

So I took the liberty to post some feedback questions within Ziki, here they are:
ShoutBox or Wall for public comments
Presence as a content type
Where’s the feed to my Ziki posts
Ziki widget

Here’s me on the web , and me in your RSS Reader …or subscribe to just a slice of me here, or even an OPML of all my sources .

[ADDED 22/07/07: Friendstreams]

[ADDED 22/07/07: Lifestream Groups]