webschuur.com

Erik and I (Bèr Kessels) decided in December last year, that the Netherlands needed a Drupal trainingshop. And that we are going to run it: Wizzlern. We are not the first Dutch trainers, bytheway; our friends at Krimson run the first Dutch trainingshop. But they are situated in Belgium, and we in the Netherlands.

I am not the first to point this out: but subscribing to Drupal issues is one of the worst things you can do.

I understand that there is no way to follow an issue in an easy way, on Drupals issuetrackers. But that should never be an excuse to frustrate the developers.

You gobble up valuable development time, from the issues
If you “subscribe”, or “+1” everyone gets update for that issues in their inbox: you are effectively abusing a developers valuable time.

We have RSS to follow posts. And more advanced systems have ways to track followups over RSS too.

But so far there seem to be no ways to actually stay informed. To integrate both, and to get the real value, to get the ‘whats happening’ for “things”. Most of all we should be able to follow updates and comments on sites. This -again- is not the same as subscribing to an RSS feed for a certain post. It is about tracking the discussion, the original posts, the discussions that spin-off on peoples own sites and the comments on certain, undefined, posts. Often a comment makes an origninal post gain its actual value. Often a followup on someone else’s blog or website gets a real momentum going.

Blogs. Conversation. Not exactly two words that people would fit in one sentence. Blogs don’t talk to eachother; maybe with some trackback system, or via technorati, but even then they don’t really conversate.

Wilfred Rubens pointed me to a very good post on this matter.

Dave Pollard investigated the very nature of a conversation, looked at how this applies to online communities and explains very clearly how blogs can improve the actual conversation, both within the weblogs and within their blogosphere.

2006 was all about two-dot-oh. Whatever that may be precisely, everyone agrees about the fact its all about ‘collaboration’. Collaboration is cool, it is productive and it is easy. You don’t need to think about where to stick your tags, because gazillion others already did that: delicious. You can not just look at images, you can tag, annotate, share and so forth them: flickr. You don’t need to browse all these stupid skipintro sites to find gigs or artist info: last.fm.

But all this has one mayor downside. What happens, for example when web2.0 goes down? What happens when web2.0 is sold without too much considerations for you? Or when it eats all your hours of data-sifting, all your hard work, just to make some more bucks? In all these cases, you’re basically fsked. If Yahoo! decides they can make more bucks by closing you out from your gigabytes/years of flickr data, bad luck for you. And what about the weeks you spent fiddling with premiere to get that 5 minute video for youtube finshed, only to find out that you are no longer the real owner?

I see a great opportunity for Drupal. Decentralisation. Distribution. P2P communication between webapplications. To Take Back The Web2.0.

In the process to implement a knowledge management system in an organisation, one of the choices to be made is what tools will be used. This article explains why Drupal makes a valid competitor in the market of knowledge management applications. It also explains how Drupal can be used for this and what features in Drupal can be used for this. Also a list of extensions (modules) to create an even better knowledge management tool is provided.