digitaldust

Simon and I met Loic Le Meur of ublog yesterday. He came in for a sales pitch for BBC blogging and found himself preaching to the converted. Well to the converted in an oppressed 1st century christian sort of way.

The most interesting stuff came after we got to talking about the similarities and differences between MT and other social software apps.

Now I stand by my assertion that blogs in and of themselves are not social creatures. It’s the bloggers themselves who naturally are, and have overcome the limitations of their tools to make it social. MT as the doyen of blogging tools is inherently solipsistic, till you add in all the sidebar madness of social networking and cross linking. It’s friends lists, comments and trackback that make it into a tangible network.

Anyway, getting on from that, we all got to talking about Livejournal and how it’s built for having friends, and we suggested new features for MT around collecting RSS feeds based on your friends list and sticking them on another page… or have that as your homepage.

I’ll have to look into how easy it would be to make an MT plugin. Or maybe do it straight in PHP. A standardised friends list using FOAF would be the best start. Got to check if there is an MT plugin for that already.