Byrne Reese: Aggregating all of these activities I participate in across the Internet should be as seamless and as easy as it was for me to create them in the first place. And until now, nothing has been made available that collects and publishes this data for your personal blog. But this plugin is not just about activity aggregation, it about control. Today, we released for Movable Type Open Source a plugin called Action Streams that allows users to input the various services they use
I agree that such an approach provides a greater level of control. It is DataPortability.org in action. Today. Without requiring Data Providers to change anything, unless they don’t currently provide a feed. Once that feed is available, Accumulators can take it from there, presenting, archiving, and mashing up the data at will.
Byrne Reese: Aggregating all of these activities I participate in across the Internet should be as seamless and as easy as it was for me to create them in the first place. And until now, nothing has been made available that collects and publishes this data for your personal blog. But this plugin is not just about activity aggregation, it about control. Today, we released for Movable Type Open Source a plugin called Action Streams that allows users to input the various services they use
I disagree about the newness, after all Lifestreams and Accumulators have been around for a long time. There even is a WordPress plugin that does something similar.
I do, however, strongly agree with the notion that such approaches provide a greater level of control. It is DataPortability.org in action. Today. Without requiring Data Providers to change anything, unless they don’t currently provide a feed. Once that feed is available, Accumulators can take it from there, presenting, archiving, and mashing up the data at will.
Such approaches are not with some peril, however. Venus, mostly by virtue of being built upon the Universal Feed Parser, has a lot of code in place to compensate for bad feeds. The Action Stream plugin does a credible job, but it appears to have let an a escaping once too many times issue by. In addition, I wonder about XSS issues.
Update: Byrne has already fixed the escaping issue. That’s fast service! As to the remaining warning, it is consequence of the fact that some sources only provide feeds in formats that not only don’t require entry level date information, but even the Best Practices Profile for RSS 2.0 doesn’t contain a recommendation that such dates be provided.
“simply cataloging activity from a widely disparate and distributed network of services” ... “to a centralized blog” :)
Anyway, I think it’s a great idea.
It would be good if I could add entries to my action stream every time I post a comment to a blog. It would be great if a tool (browser add-on) could automate that for me... something like:
"3:43PM - Jeff posts a comment on Sam Ruby’s post Accumulators come to MT"
we are more interested in simply cataloging activity from a widely disparate and distributed network of services.
There apparently is a subtle distinction that I am completely missing.
It would be good if I could add entries to my action stream every time I post a comment to a blog.
That would require me to be able to “push” an event. I already provide Comment Notification via XMPP. Now if somebody would care to write an XMPP “event catcher” that integrates with your action stream, we can start to hook the pieces up together.
It would be good if I could add entries to my action stream every time I post a comment to a blog.
You may want to check out this service (coComment): [link]
They offer a Firefox extension that, when last I was using it, seemed to do a reasonably good job of picking up comments you leave on blogs. They offer various permutations of RSS feeds to track comments from you and others.