Forum OpenACS Q&A: Response to New OpenACS.org Preliminary Site Map has been Posted
1.) I don't see why weblogs are presented so defensively. Most of the weblogs I've seen are rather thoughtful and often interesting. I don't think I've ever seen any by "annoying 12 year olds", frankly. Weblogs, in fact, are becoming more and more a factor in the web as established journalists are doing them--there was an article in the NY Times about "Me Zines" in the last day or two, focussing on this development:
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/09/business/09ZINE.html?searchpv=day01 (this article will probably only be available for free during this week)
Anyway, it might be nice to give each user a weblog as part of their account (I think advogato.com does this) or to just let people come and sign up for weblogs.
2.) To move the camera back a bit: I think the ACS has suffered for not being able to do things that people want to do out of the box. This includes weblogs.
But there are other things too: I think that Zope has succeeded at least partially because it has Squishdot, a Slashdot clone that can be used more or less out of the box. That means anyone can have their own Slashdot clone--complete with the right look-and-feel--once they install Zope.
The Zope people understood that sometimes, style = substance. Getting a Slashdot of your very own is *cool*. And everyone who sees it will feel the same. That means that they might want to try it themselves. Each Squishdot site is an advertisement for Zope--it's a viral thing. The ACS doesn't have any of that.
Speaking of Slashdot, the actual code for that site is also out there--the "SlashCode" is being used by people to build their own user-contributed-news sites. For example, plastic.com, a site used for commenting on news-of-the-day is built on the SlashCode. And there are links to Plastic on wired.com, thenewrepublic.com, etc.
The ACS has no real visibility on the web. No one is using it. Most people have never even seen it (has anyone you know ever gone to scorecard.org? I didn't think so). Yeah, people have heard of it and a few people even know what it is or have tried it, etc. But it is almost completely off the radar.
This need not remain the case, now that there's a version that doesn't require Oracle and where there's a community interested in getting it out there. But I don't expect it to be easy, since there are lots of web-frameworks, some no doubt inspired by Philip's book and/or the ACS. The field isn't as open as it used to be.
One way, of course, to get visibility, is to pick an area that hasn't been done (or hasn't been done well) and make *that* available to people. Userland has weblogs. Slashdot has its SlashCode. Perhaps there's some other functionality--something unique--that would be useful to people that either the OpenACS and/or the site openacs.org could offer. I don't know what that might be but perhaps figuring out what it could be should be given some serious thought.
Perhaps I've gone a bit off-topic with all this, but since the general idea is to do some thinking about the openacs.org and the OpenACS and how to position them, I hope these comments are constructive.
