I decided to create another weblogs community, EekFun. I started coding it 7 days ago: it is still missing some things, but I think it is usable on its current incarnation.
Motivation
My main motivation is to try to inject some oxygen into the weblogs' community (mostly, I'm refering to the group who uses to be part of The Open List, and their friends). It is my reaction against social networks like Facebook, which seem to be causing many people to abandon their weblogs.
There are many things about Facebook that I dislike, mostly the way it simplifies interaction, striping it of its richness. It gives the same weight to all sorts of relationships, acting as if my father and some random guy who I only saw 4 times 8 years ago are equally important to me, encouraging quantity over quality as far as relationships are concerned, with the only exception of the “significant other” functionality. This may match, to some extent, the way of thinking of many people in the United States and as such it may be nothing but an obvious reflection of american' individualism (which, if allowed to generalize a little, I will say I find somewhat related to their strong anarchist and libertarian traditions) but that doesn't make me dislike it any less.
In Facebook, interesting conversation such as why you enjoyed the last book you read, which touched you profoundly, very rarely take place. Instead, people just list their favorites books, movies, bands and TV episodes leave it at that. It's all very superficial. Facebook also supports many forms of mouse-based interaction where you don't even need to use your keyboard or any words to interact with other people; you can poke them, for example, or click “yes” or “no”. Of course, Facebook also supports other richer forms of interactions, but these rarely take place; most of their time users are just forwarding stuff to each joining causes just to post very superficial 2 lines messages. Facebook users are sheep. This may be simply a reflection of the interests of its users and not a fault of Facebook as a system, but that, again, doesn't make me dislike it any less.
I find the interaction that takes place in weblogs more entertaining and rich. So now you know what my personal motivation is.
What's EekFun
EekFun provides the following things:
- List of movies, books, music albums, games, tv series, events, places and products about which a given weblogger has written. It serves as an alternative way to visualize a weblog, getting a list of its posts about different items. Currently, if you go to a weblog, such as Javier's, and try to get a list of all the movies he has written about, you'll have to spend a lot of time going through his archives. In EekFun, instead, you'll get the list in just one page, with proper links (example).
- List of posts any weblogger (participating in EekFun) has made about any of the aformentioned types of items (example). One the lists start growing, I intend to let viewers rate posts (probably according to how much they agree or disagree) and I will probably show 69% of the people like this movie labels, based on the feedback from webloggers and visitors of EekFun. As such, this would become a source of reviews about items, requiring simply that someone posts about the item to their weblogs and tags their posts.
- Lists of items that the friends of a given weblogger (participating in EekFun) are recommending in their weblogs (example). Posts recommending against an item are counted as such. This list is currently stored by the number of friends recommending the item, but in the future I expect to use more sophisticated algorithms.
There are other ideas I have but which I haven't yet implemented.
How it works
Once you have become a member of EekFun, all you need to do to participate is add links to EekFun on any posts you make about an item on any of the recognized categories. By tracking your ATOM or RSS feed, EekFun will receive your post, detect the link and register. There are two types of links, one that you'll use when you want to recommend the item you are writing about and one when you want to recommend against it.
Very simple, right?
To become a member simply follow the instructions here:
Now join the fun and leave your suggestions after the beep. :-)
Discussion (3)Last update: 2008-02-07 (Rev 13626)