Slashdot Mirror
What Tools Exist for User Published Content?
wbav asks: "Recently there's been a trend to user published content. A couple of examples of this trend include Wikis, Podcasting, Blogs, and the resulting RSS Feeds. Last night I was asked if any other similar technologies exist. As I did not have a good response, that is my question to the slashdot community. Are there any other similar technologies which deal with user publishing that I have not mentioned?"
There's always MySpace.
The World is Yours.
All of your solutions are about publishing on the web, with the possible exception of podcasting, which you could argue is mp3 player-based. What about ebooks? There are several available for most major PDA platforms, some that WYSIWYG based and others that import from ASCII or HTML.
The Luddites were ahead of their time.
There's a new technology I heard about at a conference that's about to unfold some time late next year.
I think it's being released with the codename "BBS", maybe some of you have heard of it before?
mattdev@server$ touch
cannot touch `/dev/genitals': Permission denied
P2P.
But this whole topic seems soo stupid.
"It has become appallingly obvious that our blabology has exceeded our technology."
- Albert Einstein, circa 1827.
There's a ton of "user published content" action in the field of PC gaming. Pick just about any recent PC title on the planet, and chances are very good that someone has hacked/modified it and released their findings. Tons of companies nowadays (esp. developers of FPS games) wholeheartedly encourage modding games, releasing docs, developer tools, providing support, and even holding prize contests to encourage the practice.
:)
Why? Because everyone wins. Its a symbiotic relationship. Mods provide extra content for an already published title, increasing its popularity, longevity, and sales (Half-Life 1, anyone?). The community feeds itself as well as the existing game. And the cherry on top is that plenty of dev studios are recruiting the cream of the mod-scene crop to bolster their own ranks. End result is better games for everyone.
There's very few web features that aren't available as a way of delivering user content. ;)
WWW - everyone can have a webpage.
FTP, all of the P2P - everyone can host files they have made themselves.
Forums, BBS, Message Boards, Mailing Lists - based on user content.
IRC, chats - nothing more pathetic than a dead chat without users.
Banner ads - all the "banner exchange" style stuff brings it into users' hands.
Blogs - user-content journalism.
eBay - user-content e-commerce.
Development sites like SourceForge - user-content software development
del.icio.us - hell if I know what it is, but it's all user-content.
Think of mostly any service or feature of the online world and you'll find user-content counterpart easily. I'd be hard-pressed to find domains without user-content. Ones I could think of... reserved for corporate customers - say, "Microsoft Channel Bar", mostly dead by now, or Windows Update... no, nope. The user-content counterpart for this is called malware.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
http://www.graffiti.org/uk/index.html
one dat Negroponte might let them have his cheap PDA, until then it's spray paint
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Are "ordinary people" creating video content yet? Or are production and bandwidth issues still too challenging?
The thing about all the technologies you mentioned is that they're all slight tweaks of stuff that's been around for 10 years (web sites, mp3 files) and who knows why that specific tweak was all it took for the technology to take off in some new direction? I guess there's a certain "friction" value that you need to get below for something to reach critical mass.
The problem with asking the question "what's the next big thing" in any field (such as home-grown content creation and distribution technology) is that the answer is usually "something nobody has thought of before now"...
If you mean purely online, you missed photo streams (aka: blogging with pictures), video blogging and game publishing - not to mention the completely obvious (and so last-decade) free web sites. For simply distributing content, there's always BitTorrent and - my favorite underexploited - "magnet://" style links which can point to content on Peer 2 Peer networks.
On the live front, there's also the whole webcam thing which gave rise to the camwhore movement. Shoutcast type things for "internet broadcasting" your own radio station. You can also creat your own internet television station if you want.
The very latest cutting edge variant on this is peer to peer streaming video, often refered to as CoolStreaming. There's maybe a 2 to 5 minute delay in the stream as it takes a little while to patch together the video before it's decodable. While so far it's popularity seems to be limited to China (where it's used to pirate / rebroadcast regular TV channels), the main advantage is that you should be able to establish your own streaming P2P television channel with an almost unlimited number of viewers - from your existing broadband internet connection.
And finally, where the online world meets the offline, physical items are designed and sold online in virtual stores, then physically published and shipped on demand. Like Cafe Press for stuff with logos - and Lulu for things like books and CDs.
It's amazing, grandma johnson down the street can design her own webpages and yet this question gets deemed worthy enough for ask slashdot, where as a question I have asked a couple times about a way to tie SSHD into an sql database for user authentication for a running a "shell" instead of having to give 10,000 people user accounts on a machine gets constantly rejected.
It used to be that one would read slashdot for iformation from highly intelligent peers, anymore tho it feel like I should be taking off my shoes and socks as if I am going for a drive through Alabama instead.
A list of tools for publishing.... for cryin out loud, what's next? "What tools are available that sits high up off the floor, maybe has wheels and I can place my butt on it while using the computer?
I read Slashdot for the headlines, because the headlines, unlike the articles, are usually original and never duplicated
I'm surprised more people aren't mentioning lulu. You upload, they sell & distribute. Damn simple way to get all the "long tail" content out there.
Here is a typical example of the content I'm talking about. It's a great film but the distribution is so far out of the scope of the creator that it just isn't worth investing in a personalized eStore, advertising etc.
Last night I was asked if there was ever anything worth reading at Slashdot anymore. As I did not have a good response, I said maybe check out K5 instead...
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
from the most inane /. admin. does he do ANYTHING useful around here? i sure hope he's a legitimate codemonkey of some sort, as he is terrible as a story editor.
While not directly a content management system (or rather it is a CMS, but aimed heavily at the Encyclopedia market) it does very well as a CMS for pretty much any application. I use mediawiki to handle about ... well let's ask my Mediawiki:
http://www.seifried.org/security/index.php/Special :Statistics
"There are 13,208 total pages in the database. This includes "talk" pages, pages about Seifried Security Site, minimal "stub" pages, redirects, and others that probably don't qualify as content pages. Excluding those, there are 11,475 pages that are probably legitimate content pages."
Well there ya go. Setup takes about 5 minutes if you have a working UNIX/Linux/BSD server with Apache, MySQL and PHP installed.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet
Usenet is a distributed Internet discussion system that evolved from a general purpose UUCP network of the same name. It was conceived by Duke University graduate students Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis in 1979. Users, sometimes called Usenetters, read and post email-like messages (called "articles") to a number of distributed newsgroups, categories that resemble bulletin board systems in most respects. The medium is sustained among a large number of servers, which store and forward messages to one another. Usenet is of significant cultural importance in the networked world, having given rise to, or popularized, many widely recognized concepts and terms such as "FAQ" and "spam".
-- Boycott Shell
To answer the poster's question, I have no idea. I use GeekLog, and I like it.
It used to be that one would read slashdot for iformation from highly intelligent peers, anymore tho it feel like I should be taking off my shoes and socks as if I am going for a drive through Alabama instead.
I really have to take exception. Your comment is no more acceptable than any other prejudicial remark.
Visit my serial fiction site at www.cornerscribe.com
I think Digg is probably a better example than Del.icio.us, because it's a bit more "content-ful".
This whole phenomenon is a part of "the read-write web" and "social software".
Software sucks. Open Source sucks less.
I really have to take exception. Your comment is no more acceptable than any other prejudicial remark.
Can I borrow your sister tonight? Or are you using her?
There is http://diarist.com/ - free blog service and
http://drupal.org/ - open source blog/cms tool
Free Web based FTP