While I’ve owned knowledgecog.com for a few months, and I’ve had a few ideas of what I wanted to do with it, it wasn’t until recently that I actually put my ideas into practice.
I wanted to create a site that acted as a portal for all the great knowledge management blogs out there, and would automatically pull content onto that site so that I (and anyone else of course) could read it all in one place.
So I created Knowledge Cog — which pulls in the feeds from a bunch of knowledge management blogs (you can see which blogs on the right-hand sidebar) every two hours. And the site updates automatically, so we can always read the latest posts.
But I also didn’t want to detract from anyone else’s page views or visitors, because that wouldn’t really be fair to the people who create this great content. So instead of displaying all the content of a post, the site simply display the first 125 characters, and links to the original site’s content.
This way, you can browse through a whole bunch of fresh knowledge management content on the front page of Knowledge Cog, and click on the post link, which will take you to the actual article on the site of choice (you can also visit the site directly from the right sidebar).
My hope with this site is that it provides a new way to present and explore content, as well as showing only the freshest content — so one visit to Knowledge Cog will show you what’s new in the knowledge management blogosphere.
There a few bugs that I’m still working through with this. For instance, the feeds don’t always display a summary beneath the post title (I’m assuming this is because the feed is not fully syndicated, so I don’t think there’s much I can do about that).
I still also need to install a plugin to forward the original Wordpress feed to the Feedburner feed that I’ve set up for this. Apologies in advance — the RSS metafeed will be working soon enough. If anyone has any comments on how to improve the site or functionality they would like to see on it, please just let me know! UPDATE: The RSS feed is now working.
Like this post? Subscribe now to the full RSS feed.
April 25th, 2007 at 11:59 am
Lucas- You need to be careful about doing this and provide clear mechanisms to add / remove blogs from this list. Some bloggers will not like their content being repurposed this way, even if it is excerpted.
Speaking of excerpts, you should check to see if the feeds offer an excerpt already. Some bloggers will write an excerpt for this express purpose. Excerpts show up in the summary tag in Atom, and in the description tag in RSS. (I think.)
April 25th, 2007 at 12:00 pm
Crud. I forgot to mention something that would add value to what you are doing.
It would be cool if you could do some kind of threading / clustering to show groups of articles that reference each other or reference a common post.
April 25th, 2007 at 12:39 pm
I absolutely agree with what you’re saying Jack. My goal here is to certainly provide a value-added service that provides content creators with more traffic — and definitely not to detract from their own traffic. Your point is very well taken however — I think a mechanism to not only remove the owner’s site if they would like it removed, but also to add a site if the content owner would like.
I am extremely aware that the repurposing of content is a touchy issue — and I was hoping that any content owner who didn’t want to have their content included would certainly come forward. I am looking to add a contact form to the site in order to deal with these requests and suggestions, and would of course immediately remove all traces of anyone’s content who felt they didn’t want to participate.
I love that threading/clustering idea — it would certainly add a great deal of value to the links and articles being included here. I’d love to hear if you (or anyone else reading) has any suggestions for a plugin or any other technology that would enable this type of functionality.
For the exercpts, I’m still looking at ways to pull better excerpts than I have been. I know that some feeds weren’t excerpting properly, so I decided to exclude them, rather than reproduce the author’s entire post (I don’t think think that’s fair to the content author, and defeats my overall purpose of being a traffic-creating mechanism for authors).
As always, thanks for your insightful comments on this.
July 11th, 2007 at 11:28 am
I wish if I can invite you to my Business Knowledge & Research Portal that covers my research, management theories, articles, brand directory, dictionary, industry news and most customized search engines like – Article Search, Video Search, Book Search, News Search etc.