topic tags in samizdat - was: Re: [www-features] Global Protest Against the War

[boud]

[suggested followup: http://lists.indymedia.org/mailman/listinfo/syndication/ ]

hi all,

On Mon Mar 12 19:58:37 PDT 2007, Amy L. Dalton ald at riseup.net wrote:
http://lists.indymedia.org/pipermail/www-features/2007-March/0313-ev.html

> in my opinion, one of the huge problems in the indymedia network is that 
> the topic tags don't accompany the syndication feeds. i understand the 
> reason this would be a mammoth undertaking technially, but from an 
> organizing perspective, it is a major gap: it means is that we have no 
> ability to, on an ongoing and semi-automated way, reflect the 
> decentralized nature of issue-based movement building.

i don't see why it should be a mammoth undertaking - it would require
some work at imc-commwork on the contact database and local imc's gradually
adding their local info. It's definitely something on our global TODO list 
IMHO.

The contact database already lists (in principle) all the feature rdf feeds:
https://contact.indymedia.org/xml_table.php

If anyone wants to help imc-commwork people add a similar table for 
subject/topic/theme/category/focus/tag (take your pick of your preferred
name) feeds, then i'm sure they'd welcome the help:

http://lists.indymedia.org/mailman/listinfo/imc-commwork


Samizdat sites automatically publish links to RDF feeds (RSS 1.0) for
each of their focuses (themes) - look at the bottom right-hand side of
any theme (focus) page, e.g. if you start from the
https://belarus.indymedia.org front page and click on English and then
"State Terror", you'll find the channel with:

<description>Indymedia Belarus / State terror (Focus)</description>

at the URI:
http://belarus.indymedia.org/resource.rb?id=57&format=rss

provided you give "en" as the Accept-Language header in the Accept
request header-field:
http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec14.html

Your browser should do this automatically in a user-friendly way; 
a robot should do it in its software.

If you give another language, the description title will be in that language
if it's available. Articles are provided in the language most preferred.


i would guess that drupal and zope-indy provide similar rdf feeds, prioritising
by language, though i don't really know.


A few more examples:

human rights:
http://ukraine.indymedia.org/resource.rb?id=783&format=rss

state terrorism:
http://torun.axxs.org/resource.rb?id=2506&format=rss

> on the imc-us site, people hand-code the syndicated feed in order to 
> accomplish this portrayal of issue-based movement-building. here are a 
> few examples:
> impeachment campaign -- 
> http://indymedia.us/en/topic/impeachbush/archive.shtml
> immigrants rights --
> http://indymedia.us/en/topic/immigrantrights/archive.shtml
>
> hopefully we will build a topic special for the anti-war page
> (http://indymedia.us/en/topic/anti-war/archive.shtml)

Suggestion: how about IMC US publish the list of URIs it uses at the
top (or bottom) of each of these pages? Even better: publish the list
itself as an RDF feed with just one "article" contain the URIs.

That way, other local IMCs, or a robot run by the contact database 
server, could gather these RDFs together, run an "OR" operation to remove
duplicates, and that way have a semi-global* URI list for that topic.

Since topic lists are going to evolve with time, and to avoid
over-centralisation, probably having each local imc make its own collection
of URIs for a topic and then collecting together these collections sounds 
to me like a good idea.

The local aspect of this is not (yet) done in samizdat, but something
like this is planned.


In any case, there's a mailing list:

  http://lists.indymedia.org/mailman/listinfo/syndication/

exactly on this... topic.


pozdr
boud

*semi-global since very few asian and african imc's exist