Project Title: Building a Blog Ecosystem using MozBlog

Synopsis:

The suggestion is to fully realize the power of MozBlog (and scaling to other offline blogging tools and blogs in general) by creating a simple ecosystem of our consciousness revolving around blogs.

The intention is to provide an interface that not only keeps our Blog in sync but also give users a deep analysis of why we did what we did at a spur of a moment (i.e. blog) and if it all makes sense and comes together in a cosmic kind of way over the long term.

Benefits to Community:

Everyone keeps talking about blogging being the next big phenomenon but the real utility of blogs have yet to be tapped. With a proper tool which can not only post but also analyze the posts and the embedded hyperlink social network within, we hope to remedy the situation and give users a taste of the wonder of discovery.

Since one of the primary uses of Blogs is to create a log of the web we visited, a good tool could mean a powerful addendum to bookmarks, history and other online services like Furl, Delicious, A9 etc. And perhaps, personalization and collaboration of the web. Integration is key.

Deliverables:(in no particular order)

1) Search Engine: Visible on the MozBlog UI which not only searches the posts we made but also the immediate neighbourhood

2) Link Analyzer: Extract and organize links in posts. And create a graphical view of the ecosystem

3) Annotation Remembrance: A clear seperation of the original post and our annotations. In other words, not only do we want to remember what post interested us but what part of it

4) Tagging: Giving tags to posts. And subsequent export of the links to Delicious, Furl, MyYahoo, Bookmarks (where the tags could be converted to keywords)

5) Reverse Tagging: The ability to query for the links on online services like Technorati and get the tags associated with it. Try to build a community taxonomy for our link archive

6) Trackbacking: Suppose we blogged on some post. MozBlog should get other posts which also cite the post. Also, get comments for our own posts

7) More Formatting: Font colors and highlighting

8) Pretty Printer: Recreate Blog for offline browsing

Project Details:

Blogs and other personal publishing systems encapsulate a lot of information and behaviour. The posts, the links, the blogrolls etc. are like a halo that, for lack of a suitable word, defines who we are and what our thoughts are.

MozBlog is a pretty powerful tool as it creates a copy of a blog on local disk, can synchronize pretty well to changes we made to the blog from other locations or devices and the ability to annotate the posts to our hearts content. MozBlog is not really unique from any other offline blogging tools but it is rather convenient in that it is fully integrated into the browser. So, it becomes quite powerful.

Whatever it is, for MozBlog or in fact, for any offline blogging tool or any service that deals with personal publishing, there is much richness that has yet to be tapped. One can already feel that by the buzz that blogging and Wikis have created ever since they came into existence. And we have only begun to explore this richness in the context of the many many services blooming everywhere.

Using MozBlog as a platform, I wish to explore deeper into the blog ecosystem. The methods mentioned (seperating, extracting and archiving annotations, links, comments, trackbacks) are ideas at this stage which I have been exploring in my research and which not only make sense intuitively but also theoretically.

I can also do a more detailed proposal with mock-up screens and scenarios if required.

Project Schedule:

The project will take approximately 3 months for the list above with a starting date of June-15th for an early start.

Bio:

Am a 2nd year PhD student at the University of Glasgow researching in the area of personal information organization and retrieval.

I strongly feel that personal publishing (websites, Blogs, Wiki's) are quite powerful which need to be explored and proper tools created towards this purpose.

I have been meaning to hack MozBlog for a while and this summer-of-code opportunity has just pushed me into the zone to actually get to do it.

I am a lead developer of the Mozdev project Accessibar (http://accessibar.mozdev.org) and the Sourceforge project Jendx (http://jendx.sourceforge.net).