Dave Bryson: What if the Radio Community Server were down for a day?
Dave talks about the importance of the community server. He paints a picture of a network of servers that exchange data in the same way that the network of SMTP servers exchanges mail. Or perhaps more like the way NNTP servers exchange news.
To be able to do the kind of interesting things you hear people talking about concerning blogs such as: rating, ranking, comments, filtering, categorization, etc... I think you need a WCS and many of them.
Comments can be done without a community server, but all the clustering / analysis functions need some sort of centralised server to perform efficiently. At the moment we have things like blogdex, daypop, google and my ecosystem, but they aren't exactly infallible - blogdex and daypop were dead the last time I looked, and the server in my living room that runs the ecosystem is in the process of destroying itself right now!
A group of WCSs could add value to the stream of weblogs that might pass through it. Letting users know when updates are made, filtering and forwarding weblogs to another specialized WCS that might focus on a category by keeping weblogs related to it's interests and throwing away the rest. Or letting a community know when a java blog or single entry (that I don't usually subscribe to) has been added or updated. So I can subscribe to a subject not a specific blog. I'm sure there's much more.
This is a field that hasn't progressed that far yet. WMDI will help move some of it along, and trackback is helping with some of the filtering. Trackback aggregation (with appropriate authentication) like the previous example can filter out relevant articles from blogs you don't usually read, although it isn't in all blogging tools just yet. Radio has its multi-author tool which does the same thing but with RSS.
5:35:25 PM 
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