Blogs are Islands (but they don't have to be)

Bud Gibson has a vision that (if successful) will connect a collection of blogs in a tighter and more meaningful way that tiptoes into a community space. It's called the The BIT320 Distributed Learning Blogosphere, and MyST Technology Partners (Andy specifically) is providing technical guidance to help Bud create a production quality blog system designed to support classroom and small team learning.

As we're all aware, relationships between blog posts and blogs can be established though a number of mechanisms such as track-backs, but to create a tighter coupling; one that creates value by leveraging the sum-of-the-parts, requires an authoritative server to handle things like unified search of the blogs. There are many other benefits that accrue to the idea of a SmartSpace that aggregates (or places an umbrella over) blogs about a common theme. Search is a big one, but other areas to consider include:

• Imagine a Microsoft Office Research Service that allows Office users to perform a look-up into this tight group of blogs from any Office document?
• Imagine Office users subscribing to a smart tag recognizer that automatically links all the blog post titles from any Word document back to the blog posts.
• Imagine users creating their own [custom] RSS feeds that slice across the entire collective of blogs.
• Imagine a recommendation engine that based on search queries can also tell you who is likely to know the most about a particular subject. We call this three-dimensional social networking because it embodies people that create information for people that know people that cinsume information. 
• Imagine a social network map based not just on who knows who, but who knows who that reads blog posts about 'x'.

Although Bud is focusing on small team learning environments, this model applies to knowledge management and many other business-related information and collaboration objectives.