Phil Wolff has shared interesting ideas for weblog features before, and has a long response to Dave Winer's open solicitation for some. Here are some cool ideas of his and others' from the thread:
- Erik Neu's "SourceNotes" idea. Much less weblog integration, I want my own personal searchable web history, like OmniWeb 5's searchable history. Rauno Saarinen mentions Furl later; Matt Mullenweg suggests the sameand notes (as David did in Matt's comments) there's a Movable Type plugin already. As a full-blown agent more like l.m.orchard's Agent Frank, not only a search engine, it could also be Phil Wolff's RSS (etc) autodetective.
- Jim Biancolo's comment posting by email for a completely static public site. All you need is push, so IM would work too, except it has worse browser integration: you couldn't click a link and have it open your IM client, ready to send to a particular address.
- Franz Scherz' suggestion to not see posts with the same content. This may be easy based on the included links, or on text analysis techniques; I plan to try it when I pick up Prrarf again.
- Wolff talks a lot about enclosures, especially posting structured data. That's odd, as no one in weblogging uses them. RSS entries have URLs in the text content, but I haven't seen folks moving arbitrary data around with enclosures much. This may grow with Atom syndication, as it supports items with arbitrary data types, so you can have your audio entry be your entry instead of being linked from it or "enclosed" with it.
- Wolff's theme subscription.
- Everyone wants better tools for writing and posting: spell check, better integration with other tools (drag-drop etc), WYSIWYG editing for entries and comments, read/write browser integration.
- The big thing coming: an identity system and everything it will enable. This is authenticated comments, private entries, automated blogrolls, integrated group membership. Wolff says it's "hard to do unless you have a critical mass of participants in the ID system, very hard for smaller, independent weblog hosts. Beat that roadblock, please." I still see multiple systems--LiveJournal, Jabber, your pycs.net login, your Movable Type login, self-auth with PGP--but FOAF can be a format for interoperability. Use FOAF to knit the small systems into one, which is how the Internet works.
