Leveraging our collective knowledge
Or, The People’s Champion.
As you may have read, Nice Web Type makes use of several excellent web services. Ma.gnolia for news, tips, & resources; Flickr for found web type and crit; Twitter and Wordpress for an ongoing list of the site’s happenings.
Nice Web Type is really just the glue.
Everything you see comes from somewhere else, all pulled together using RSS feeds and Simplepie. Sort of like a refined blogging with Ma.gnolia. Nice Web Type, the website, is updated any time you or I contribute to a constituent service. We can post screenshots using Flickr. We can post links of interest using Ma.gnolia.
This approach affords us the unique benefits of each individual service and a bird’s eye view as well. Plus, the potential exists to add new services and new parts of existing services; for instance, I hope to tap into the discussions that have begun to pop up.
Discussions, mind you, that occur in environments familiar to those folks doing the discussing! Ma.gnolia users can chat via Ma.gnolia. Flickr users can chat via Flickr. Some folks like to do both.
Maybe some day there’ll be an OpenID-based way to thread thoughts across what we might now consider genres of text-based communication (forums, chats, blogs, etc.), to tie together large thematic conversations. For now, at least all of Nice Web Type’s discussions are a breeze. Someone else keeps them up and running nicely!
Leveraging our collective knowledge means more than syndication, though. It happens before we create social bookmarks or post screenshots.
Heck, it happens before our fingers touch the keys.
The decision that we each make, to share our gifts and our energies, is one that I personally revere, appreciate, and hope to encourage. That’s where Nice Web Type comes in: it’s a fluid group of places, anchored by purpose and perspective, where we can all learn from one another. You’re as much a part of it as I am.
I don’t make Nice Web Type. NiceWebType.com doesn’t even make Nice Web Type. The people make Nice Web Type.
What now?
Join the Nice Web Type Ma.gnolia group – discuss, and contribute bookmarks.
Join the Nice Web Type Flickr group – discuss, and contribute screenshots.
Follow Nice Web Type on Twitter – for site happenings and updates on things (like discussions) that you might not notice at a glance.
Thanks for reading! If you got this far, I hope you’ll stick around. (Because I know you’re interested, and interested people make for great questions and discussions.)
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This writing is part of tbrown.org by Tim Brown.
Read about Tim and tbrown.org on the home page.
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Instead of comments, tbrown.org uses a Ma.gnolia group for conversation. It has all kinds of nifty features (I especially like having the ability to edit my comment for 15 minutes before it’s, “official”). You don’t even have to create a username to join, just use your OpenID!
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