Archive - Jan 12, 2005
Exploding the Explosion
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 01/12/2005 - 14:23Today, I signed up for Blog Clicker. On first glance, it appears to be a cheap knockoff of Blog Explosion. People whave told me it is going to be much better than Blog Explosion. I will explore it a little bit and see what I think.
This does illustrate a little bit the whole idea of dealing with startups. The barriers to entry for new competitors is very low. If someone can come up with a slightly better way of doing Blog Explosion, BlogClicker, or whatever the next variant will be, they can draw away the traffic. However, there are a lot of people that will stay with Blog Explosion because they were first to market.
If any of you have looked at both Blog Clicker and Blog Explosion and would like to make comments about why you like one or the other better, I would love to hear it.
A new Drupal Filter
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 01/12/2005 - 05:06Today, I had a conference call with Aaron Kline from Progressive Punch. I started talking with Aaron though Zack at CivicSpace about coming up with a nice way to bring data from Progressive Punch into CivicSpace sites.
Based on these discussions, I worked on two Drupal filters, wmfilter and curlfilter. wmfilter allows users to connect create simple links to other sites using the Media Wiki syntax. curlfilter retrieves data from one site and embeds it in a CivicSpace site using CURL. Used together you can easily retrieve data from Progressive Punch's database of congress people to embed in your own CivicSpace website. You can see a sample of this at the Test SmartCampaigns site.
