Sharing discussion area info

[Dan Lyke <danlyke@flutterby.com>]

I've thought a bit about ways to make my weblog more collaborative
while still maintaining the local control.

Last summer, Carl Coryell-Martin and I talked this problem, and decide
the right way to proceed was sharing discussion information between
weblogs, a way for me to say "I've said something about this URL, and
my readers posted responses to it", figuring that if we could get a
few people doing this we could send people to the places where the
discussions were most likely to be interesting.

Well, I got together with Carl again yesterday evening, and while we
did talk about it the whole weblogging thing has fallen off the radar
at Civilution, but while adding descriptions to my main RSS feed this
morning I decided it'd be a good idea to slap up this data in a way
that others could use it, in the hopes that someone else would publish
this and then we could do something with it.

So information on the 15 most recently discussed topics on Flutterby
is available at http://www.flutterby.com/discuss.rdf in RSS1.0 using
the namespace "discuss", updated hourly. A quick "how I created this
in Perl" is at http://www.flutterby.com/software/rssdiscuss/

I'm the sole user, it's not fixed in stone and it's the first RSS 1.0
thing I've done (and I now need to go thrash severely the authors of
the XML::RSS module for some of their transgressions[1]) so I'm
completely unaware of any culture or politics around extensions and
the like.

Feedback appreciated.

Dan

[1] "Escape" [whap] "your" [whap] "entities!" [whap] "!"