Sometu all over the place

[Jos Schuurmans]

We've seen several initiatives in creating a Sometu presence on various social media and social networking services lately.

Personally, I think that's a good thing, since it reflects what I call "the distributed nature of the Internet": people self-organize around topics of their interest and engage in conversations within the communities, networks and other places of their choosing.

To try and confine Sometu-related discussions to a limited number of places on the Net, would be counter-productive and unfeasible. It is best to give people choice in how they prefer to interact around Sometu. The broader the offering, the more people will share the experience.

Having said that, the fact is that these dispersed conversations are hardly ever all-inclusive. I take it that http://sometu.ning.com is still more-or-less the "mother ship", a place where most things Sometu are captured and can be found.

There is value in having such a "mother ship". For new people interested in Sometu, as well as for those getting back into the subject matter after having strayed for a while, there should be a central place where to get up-to-date and into the loop.

Hence my wondering if we could figure out how to feed back the information and conversations related to Sometu, which are being shared in all those other places, so that they are also available on http://sometu.ning.com.

I'm thinking RSS feeds, alert services, etc. Perhaps they could be aggregated and forged into one single RSS feed using tools like FriendFeed or Yahoo! Pipes, and then imported into the mother ship...

What do you think? Would this add value? Are we already doing this? If not, how can we set it up?

[Sanna Brauer]

Or then tag those as sometu in Delicious to pop up on the front page, even though for a short while. Works already fine. Then we have this option using feeds - we already have e.g. Flickr, Twitter and Qaiku on the main page (btw Flickr is out of language limits - so use it!) . What should and would be the appropriate channel for in English members? - when we have one channel which is in use, and we seriously share contents - I think we have solved many problems in activating in English group? Then we CAN bring the feed on the main page, on mother's good care :) .

However, in my opinion we are not that strong @sometu in English that we should systematically activate discussions in different networks under the topics which basicly belong to the mother ship. Still, I see remarkable values when spreading the Sometu spirit, knowledge and inspiration at the very same package for other forums, networks and societies.

[Tuomo Turja]

One temporary solution would be voluntary commenting about blog or microblog or wiki texts in Sometu ning.