As you are probably aware I have been working on a big application that I hope to release sometime this year. It is called statzen and it provides a new way for publishers to keep track of what people are reading. I have been making some major breakthroughs on statzen lately. Yesterday I added APML support (XML format for sharing attention data). Most APML uses I have seen are for getting information about what you are giving attention to (i.e. the APML file showing what feeds I give attention to in NetNewsWire). The APML file for jaxn.org (powered by statzen) currently is showing attention data for “concepts” (i.e. tags and categories). The data is based on what you the readers are giving attention to.
The APML file I am publishing is using 3 profiles. The first and default profile shows the combined data from both web and feed attention. The second profile is showing attention from the web site itself while the third profile shows attention data from my RSS feed. This data could be used by search engines, meme trackers, etc to see what my blog is most authoritative about. There are other profiles that I may add in the near future that could be real game changers.
While statzen is my main project, it is not my only project. Last week I launched urlzen.com. It is a URL shortener that provides information about how many times the short URL was clicked and from where (another prime candidate for APML). My goal for urlzen was to create something useful while also testing out the Google AppEngine platform. It has been a success in my eyes, and I think there are some users who enjoy using it (I know it is the easiest URL shortener I have used, but I haven’t used all of them).
I have a few more *zen projects up my sleeve (or in my subversion repository) that I hope to roll out in the near future. The next will likely be syndizen.com (not currently active). It will be the rebirth/rebranding of Summarizr. The purpose of syndizen will be to make it easy to post summaries of feeds to your blog via XML-RPC. A great example is bookmarks. Social Bookmarking sites like del.icio.us and ma.gnolia have a feature that automatically posts your new bookmarks to your blog every day or week. It is a great feature and one I use from ma.gnolia (now that they added it). The thing is, I am starting to share links via multiple services and tools. I would like something that combines my NewsGator clippings, ma.gnolia bookmarks, and possibly my urlzen links in a single daily post. Syndizen will be perfect for that. Other people may want to use it to provide links to posts that they write on other blogs (group blogs they are a part of, company blogs, etc). As services like Disqus and IntenseDebate start to catch on it could also be neat to share links to conversations that you have been participating in elsewhere. All of these uses can also be done with sidebar widgets, but that kinda ignores feed subscribers.
The goal is not to cross post the content to all of these places but rather to provide a nice package to regularly post summaries of what you have going on elsewhere on the web. I have always felt like my blog is my home on the web, and while lifestreaming applications are kind of neat, I typically find them too cluttered; there is not a single lifestream that I visit regularly.
So what do all of these *zen applications have in common? This morning at the Nashville Geek Breakfast, Chuck suggested that I am using “zen” to mean meta data since all of these services provide some additional meta data about the content. The way I think of it is that all of these services are tools to manage content across multiple delivery channels. They also all strive to provide new insights into how that content is being used. The “zen” is about that additional insight.
Anyway, I had to talk about this stuff a little because I wrote some really cool code for statzen tonight. I don’t want to say specifically what I was working on tonight but I am so gassed about the future that I had to share something.
Thanks for reading.
Related Note: The *zen theme started back in 2001 or so. I was doing geeky stuff for non-profits who were really struggling with the rapid changes that technology was causing. My goal was to try and make things easy for them. That is when I purchased tekzen.net (mostly used for email and DNS pointers to various servers now).
