Thought I’d share a few notes on the things we test in the Kaplak Labs these days. Kaplak Labs is simply a WordPress based site in our WordPress MU powered setup, on which we test themes and plugins before we employ them on other sites. Right now I’m preoccupied with setting up a filtering process for Kaplak Stream. This filtering process aims to sanitize feed items and add some stuff to each item, which improves it’s chances for survival in the stream :
Retrieve all tags/categories from posts and create new tags/categories if they don’t exist.
Semi-automatically tag/categorize all feed items. Sometimes feed publishers don’t tag/categorize posts very well, and even a well-tagged/categorized item may have new meaning in a different context. We use the Calais Autotagging plugins for WordPress to do this, for the time being.
Convert all categories and tags to categories only, to keep things clean and simple. We actually treat categories as tags, though. Because WP categories is the more widely used functionality of WordPress of the two, we’ve decided to go with categories over tags.
Add link to the item source directly in the feed item content, to make sure (sort of) that it stays with the unaltered post when it is fetched and possibly re-published from the Kaplak Stream.
Cache all images locally to improve performance and avoid traffic spikes on source sites, when subsequent sites fetches images all way back from the source. Kaplak Stream hosts all images (for which we will probably be using Amazon S3) to ensure their availability for all sites which fetch items from the stream.
It should also filter out spam and duplicate items. We still have to sort out however, what happens if an improved version of a post gets fed back into the Stream. Ultimately, we’d like users to be able to tag and categorize items according to the contexts they use them in, and be able to retrieve these back into posts in the stream.
In the process of setting this up I discovered Yahoo Pipes, which looks like a very useful tool taking in an amount of data (in a feed format), manipulate it and spit out a new feed. Experimented a bit with it, and found it a bit tricky to actually create something useful, but will no doubt give it some further attention. We may be able to use it for something.
Great to see this round of improvements! Some of the most important features seem to be support for tags and formatting filters. The plugin has also been removed from beta status and supports all the latest versions of WordPress (2.5 and 2.6).
What a great smile - and what a great day for the world. I’m proud to have been a witness and a very modest and distant yet participant in this momentous moment of change in our history. Because what has been changed is the order of one-way politics, the order of read-only culture, of one-way, top down communications. What’s in is read-write culture, two-ways politics and bottom-up, peer-produced communications. I’m excited to be living in these times, and I share Obama’s vision and desire to leave our children with a mark on our times and world, of which we can be proud.
Saw President Obama’s speech from Chicago earlier this morning. If one is only going to listen to one speech in one’s life, it’s a pretty good candidate. If you haven’t already seen or heard it, I post the video here for your convenience.
Here’s the full text of Obama’s speech. The brilliant photo at the top is used courtesy of Bella Rua Photography from Flickr, taken at the Rollins Park rally in Concord, NH, September 29th, 2007. The photo is shared under a Creative Commons license.
EDIT: Took me a while to actually find an embeddable video of the full speech and of better quality than the one posted to YouTube. It’s worth listening to the complete speech - not just get the soundbites. I finally found the above courtesy of Yahoo Video.
We believe that real change can only come from the bottom up. And technology empowers people to come together to make that change. —Barack Obama, speech at Google, Nov. 14th 2007.
What’s at stake in this election
I believe this US presidential election is a matter of grave importance, not just to the US but perhaps even more so to the rest of the world. First, the American leadership sets an example for the world. The damages caused by the one set by the administration headed by George W. Bush is best scrutinized in Michael Moore’s film Fahrenheit 9/11. We need new leadership, a new vision and new examples to be set. We need a US president who can deliver this.
Second, the American economy influences the world’s economy. When a global economic power sinks into the bottomless financial pit of a brutal war of aggression, it not only sets a bad example for other nations, including Russia and all kinds of dictatorships, it also cannot help but bode ill for the world’s economy. We need a strong US economy, or at least a US economy which is capable of dealing with the challenges facing the United States internally, in order to lift the more serious challenges we face, such as world poverty and hunger and threats to our environment posed by our lifestyle and consumption patterns.
Third, and this is where we need real leadership, and real change, is to straighten out global priorities in the way the internet is, can and will be used. In particular, the US leadership is important in what is sometimes called ‘intellectual property law’. We need to stilt the draconian IP laws enacted in the US (I’m talking about the DMCA and similar legislation, if anyone should be in doubt). We need to stop these laws from becoming even more draconian, and we need to ultimately push them back. What’s at stake is hinted at in Lawrence Lessig’s marvelous book Free Culture, but isn’t limited to the remixing of music videos and animations - it’s our problem-solving capabilities which are at stake. Our ability to make good decisions based on trustworthy information, processed and exchanged freely using the internet, on a global scale, is at stake. If the US technology sector cannot lead the way because of the draconian American IP legislation, it will be a poorer world, and the struggle to get there will be harder and fraught with greater difficulties.
Barack Obama is now following you on Twitter!
As I am not American, unfortunately I can’t vote in the US presidential election taking place tomorrow. If I could I’d have no doubts. I’d vote for Obama. Not because he necessarily stand for and will enact all the things that I hope for the world, but because I think he will enact the kind of leadership, which sets an example and will facilitate the changes we need.
I have not been following the course of Barack Obama very closely, but even from a long distance he’s been able to make an impression. All thanks to the wonderful powers of the internet, which he’s utilized in his campaign with such intelligence and vitality. It made an impression when he followed me back on Twitter. Him or his campaign staff, either way, it’s an attention to detail which impresses. Coming from someone I respected and consider of high integrity, it also made a great impression on me reading Marc Andreessen’s personal account of a meeting with Obama. What impressed me in Andreessens account is the way Obama listened rather than talked, a characteristic which I felt showed his genuine interest in the problems presented to him. And lastly, he gained great respect in my book for appearing so genuinely as himself on the Daily Show and being able to stand up to the jokes of Jon Stewart in such as relaxed manner.
Lately I’ve been reading up on Obama’s tech policies, and the one thing I note with the greatest clarity is his emphasis on what can be done in America, in order to lift not only America, but also the challenges we face globally.
Seizing the moment : Obama’s speech at Google
Obama spoke last year (November 14th 2007) at Google’s HQ in Mountain View about his technology and innovation program. Watching this video of his speech I found I learned a great deal about Obama - and not just about his views on technology. If you haven’t had a chance to see this before, please join me here :
I took some time out to transcribe Obama’s entire speech below. It’s one of those speeches which apparently is not included in any of the official lists. Most blogs quote his technology policy press release, but I find it illuminating to read the words he actually used speaking at Google, and I learned a great deal about him in the process of transcribing his words. It’s a great speech, and one that resonates greatly with me.
Full transcript of Obama’s speech
When you start to think about it, there is something improbable about this gathering. Afterall it wasn’t much more than a decade ago that Larry and Sergei got together in a dormroom as graduate students with a big idea to organize all of the world’s information into an accessible form. And at the time I was a [novice? Illinois?] state senator, doing my best to help people get a better shot at their dreams.
What we shared is a belief in changing the world from the bottom up, not the top down. That a bunch of.. that ordinary people can do extraordinary things. We shared that, and we also shared a bunch of student loans that still needed to be paid off. (laughter) And you would have found it hard to predict that Larry and Sergei would now be the co-founders of one of the most successful companies in recent history. And that I would be standing on this stage today as a candidate for president of the United States.
But this is where improbable journeys have led. This is where the moment finds us. And I’d like to say a few words about what I believe we have to do together, to seize this moment with a sense of purpose and a sense of urgency.
We know how the first chapters of the Google story have turned out. Afterall, all of you have good jobs. But we also know that the Google story is more than just being about the bottom line. It’s about seeing what we can accomplish when we believe in things that are unseen. When we take the measure of our changing times and we take action to shape them. And that’s why we’re here today. That’s why many of you decided to work here instead of somewhere else.
Technology and innovation have reshaped our economy and our lives at breathtaking speed. America’s been fighting to figure out how to tap this awesome new ressource we have. And Google’s helped to show us the way. But the story is far from over. Google’s story is far from over. The story about how we shape our changing times is far from over. What comes next depends on the choices that we make right now, at this moment, in this election.
We could see the spirit of innovation that started this company be stifled. We could see the internet divided up to the highest bidders. We could see a government that uses technology to shut people out, instead of letting them in. Tax breaks shuffled to special interests, while the next startup, the next Google can’t get a fair shot. Challenges like health care and energy that hold our country back while competition from other nations picks up. That’s one alternative.
Another alternative is for us to unlock a new future of opportunity. Together we could open up the government and invite all citizens in, while connecting all of America to 21st century broadband. We could use technology to help achieve universal health care. To reach for a clean energy future. And to ensure that young Americans can compete and win in the global economy.
If America recommits itself to science and innovation then we can lead the world to a new future of productivity and prosperity.
That’s what we can do if we seize this moment. That’s the choice we face.
As president, I intend to work with you to write the next chapter in the story of American innovation. That’s part of the reason why I’m running for president of the United States.
To seize this moment we have to ensure free and full exchange of information. And that starts with an open internet. (applause) I will take a backseat to noone in my commitment to network neutrality. Because once providers start to privilege some applications or websites over others then the smaller voices get squeezed out and we all lose. The internet is perhaps the most open network in history and we have to keep it that way.
To seize this moment, we have to connect all of America to 21st century infrastructure. As president, I will set a goal of ensuring that every American has broadband access, no matter where you live, no matter how much money you have or don’t have. We will raise the standards for broadband speed. We will connect schools and libraries and hospitals. We will take on the special interests so that we can finally unleash the power of wireless spectrum for our safety, our security and our connectivity.
To seize this moment, we have to use technology to open up our democracy. It’s no coincidence that one of the most secretive administrations in our history has favored special interests and pursued policies that could not stand up to the sunlight. As president, I’m gonna change that. We will put government data online in universally accessible formats. (applause) I’ll let citizens track federal grants, contracts, earmarks and lobbying contracts. I’ll let you participate in government forums, ask questions, in realtime, offer suggestions that will be reviewed before decisions are made. And let you comment on legislation before it is signed. And to ensure that every government agency is meeting 21st century standards, I will appoint the nation’s first Chief Technology Officer to coordinate and make certain that we are always at the forefront of technology and that we are incorporating it into every decision that we make. (applause)
And if you wanna know how I’ll govern, just look at our campaign. We received over 370.000 donations online, half of which have been under 25 dollars. Nearly 300.000 Americans have their own accounts on Barackobama.com. They’ve created thousands of grassroots groups. They’ve offered up over 15.000 policy ideas. Because we believe that real change can only come from the bottom up. And technology empowers people to come together to make that change.
Because at this moment I think we have to do more than get our house in order. The opportunity in front of us is bigger than that. Seizing this opportunity is gonna depend on more than what the government does or even what the technology sector does. It’s gonna depend on how together we harness technology to confront the biggest challenges that America faces.
Just imagine what we could do. If we commit ourselves to electronic medical records, then we can lift up the quality of health care and reduce error at dramatically lower costs. (applause) If we take on special interests and make aggressive investments in clean and renewable energy, like Google’s done with solar here in Mountain View, then we can end our addiction to oil, create millions of jobs, and save the planet in the bargain.
If we make technological literacy a fundamental part of education, then we can give our children the skills they need to compete and ensure the next generation of scientists and engineers as being educated right here in America.
We can do this, but we can’t wait. Because Silicon Valley is not the only corner of innovation in the world. If America doesn’t seize this moment, then we will face only more competition from Dubai and Dublin, from Shanghai and Mumbai. So instead of George Bush’s policy of undermining science, I intend to double federal funding for basic research and make the RND tax credit permanent. (applause) To keep the door open for the next generation of startups, I will enforce tough antitrust laws. And to ensure that America continues to attract the worlds’ best and brightest, we need comprehensive immigration reform, that strengthens permanent residence VISA’s like the H1B program.
We need to make sure that the next success story, the next Google, happens here, in America. The Google story is about what can be achieved when we cultivate new ideas and keep the playing field level for new businesses. But it’s also about not settling for what we’ve already achieved. It’s about constantly raising the barr, so that we’re more competitive, and so that we use technology to reach ever expanding horizons.
You know, the first time I was back here, in 2004, Larry showed me the image that tracks all the internet searches taking place in the world. I wrote about this in my book. I saw the Earth rotating on a flat panel monitor with the different lights for different languages marking all of the traffic on this wondrous network, a network, that didn’t even exist when almost all of us here were born. (laughter) Almost.
But what struck me wasn’t the light on that globe. It was the darkness. Most of Africa, chunks of Asia, even parts of the United States. The disconnected corners of our interconnected world. Where the promise of the 21st century is being eclipsed by peril. You and I must not settle for anything less than an America that replaces that darkness with a new light.
Because the promise and prosperity of a new economy must not be the property of the few.
It must be a force that lifts up our entire country and ultimately lifts up the entire world. (applause) We have the privilege to live in a transformational moment. A moment when an idea can change the world. A moment when technology empowers us to come together as never before, while letting each of us reach for our own individual dreams. A moment when we can finally progress and move beyond the huge challenges that have stood in the way of progress for far too long.
We can not and we must not look back and regret that we settled for anything less. And that’s why I’m asking you to join me in seizing this moment. I’m asking you to join me in changing the world. Thank you very much everybody. Thank you. (drowning in standing ovations)
Interview : Break the fever of fear
Obama’s speech is followed in the video with an insightful, relaxed and entertaining on stage interview hosted by Google CEO Eric Schmidt. In this interview Obama talks very open-heartedly about why he’s running for president in the first place, and why he’s running now. He’s also asked how he will actually end the war in Iraq, if he presumably takes office. As most will know, Obama opposed the war in Iraq. This speech from 2002 against the war in Iraq is well worth another read.
Obama sums up his foreign policy with the French president Sarkozy’s words, to “be more liked”. Meaning, that if the US is more respected and recognized for it’s diplomatic efforts, it will be easier to build up trust which enables problem-solving and diplomatic solutions and harder to create mistrust against Americans. Obama will “break the fever of fear” which has been exploited by the Bush administration to instill fear and distrust :
We’re told to be afraid of terrorists, of immigrants.. and each other … Our values are distorted .. not being certain if simulated drownings are really torture… That’s not who we are, as Americans. Sometimes I’m accused of being this progressive, far-out… - I’m conservative, in the sense that I want us to get back to those values that were essential to building America.
After posting my article on the anatomy of Kaplak Stream I found this brilliant video featuring Dan “back of the napkin” Roam. Incredibly insightful stuff, about something we all can learn from and be a lot better at : visualizing and communicating our problems, visions and solutions. Please enjoy :
You can support Kaplak and buy Dan’s book here if you are going to buy it anyway. I know I am.
Sometimes I prefer to visualize an idea using nothing else but notepad - or preferably just pen and paper, whatever I have in front of me. The ‘back of the napkin‘ philosophy fits well with me. In fact when I tidy up old stacks of paper once in a while, I always find sketched down ideas on the back of envelopes and in impossible places such as the backside of letters from the tax office. Do I archive it under that particular idea and project - or does it go into the tax papers stack?
The Kaplak Stream napkin model
Here’s an updated napkin model for Kaplak Stream which I recently created in Notepad :
This model shows the very basic idea of Kaplak Stream. The Arts and History websites are different sites, but have some tags or categories in common, such as ‘knights’ and ‘romantic’. But each site has no way of knowing about this; they may not even be aware of the other site’s existance. They’re separate systems, islands of information. A visitor clicking on a tag on the Arts site won’t see the items tagged the same on the History site. Now, when the feeds of both sites are fed into the Kaplak Stream, it allows new types of long tail sites to be created.
By pooling our feeds, we allow new contexts to be created. This can happen when feeds are extracted from the stream for particular tags or categories. When feeds are pooled, even tags and categories that are not used a lot on an individual website, may spawn new rich web contexts, which are capable of sending traffic back to the original publishers, but, what is more important, enable the distribution of products (via affiliate models) which are otherwise hard to sell in a mainstream context.
In this case a Knights site and a Romantic site can be easily created. Neither of these new sites could exist within the History or the Arts sites, but because we pool and channel the information from a wider range of sources, they can now.
Here’s the expanded version of the above model (which is also an improvement over the model, I previously posted on Kaplak Blog) :
As this model shows, linking back to feed publishers for increased visibility of their sites and contexts is a key feature of the network. Submit your feed and gain greater visibility, because more sites “on the way” will link back to your site. This is key for publishers to actually want in and be part of what we’re doing. However, this is just the short-term benefits.
Connecting the disconnected
When feeds are extracted from Kaplak Stream and into other niche contexts, publishers will connect more easily with these contexts and communities, empowering both publishers and communities, who would otherwise not know each other. Anything may arise from these new connections : meetups, exchange of ideas, products, etc. It is in this new context, that the sales of niche products are more easily arranged, probably most likely and easily via the use of affiliate programs.
As we have previously learned, attributing value to the context of finding information, rather than to any particular piece of information, is the more effective route to Kaplak’s goal, in an environment such as the web which literally explodes with new information every day. Creating very finely segmented sites will enable passionate users to more easily reference interesting niche material, i.e. create recommendations socially for interesting information items as well as products sold in these niche domains. Simply because there are now rich niche domains and contexts, which will be worthwhile the link, contrary to the situation before the aggregation and filtering, where the niche items were spread out all over the web - and very difficult and timeconsuming to find using search, bookmarking services, Wikipedia, StumbleUpon or Digg-type sites.
With time, some of these new niche sites and contexts may connect otherwise disconnected communities with each other and possibly even grow their own small communities, which will enrich those contexts even further with valuable context. The value of these new contexts do not depend on the short-term Google juice of linking back to sources I mentioned earlier. Instead, it thrives and builds on the social connections and recommendations, which now can rest on increasingly more bonified points of reference - and (probably with time) even greater tools for sharing than what we have right now.
What’s important for this project to succeed is to tag/categorize incoming items conveniently and precisely. We’ll continue to work and experiment with autotagging, but the best bet is (with time) to make tagging a social proces which can take place for each item all the way of it’s ‘journey’. For the time being however, we rely heavily on feed items being richly tagged by their source publishers. This is one challenge, we face right now.
Any ideas?
Because it’s so critical to what we do to thoroughly understand what’s at stake, it’s also vital that we invite input every step of the way. If nothing else we want to give you the opportunity to read, think and absorb our ideas, and go out and implement your own tools and architectures - for every step of our way. And when you’ve done that - come back and tell us about it. We’d love to learn more.
We have yet to setup proper forms for receiving feed submissions, but we’ve begun to receive them anyway. For the time being, please submit your feeds to The Kaplak Team or directly to me via Twitter or Identi.ca. Remember to give us a few keywords on the contents of your feed (just the most important ones).
The Kaplak Mailing List was an important part of the first website of ours at Kaplak.com. However it didn’t come to play the envisioned role in our business strategy; as a direct communications channel and method of communicating directly with our potential customers. As you may be aware, we have focused instead on building a somewhat active blog.
The blog offers a number of RSS feeds for your convenience, which can be read using any feed reader you prefer, and thus offer greater choice and ultimately convenience for most readers. It is not confined to people who have first signed up for our list, and it can be easily shared with others. It also means that every communications effort we make, be it here on the blog or in the wiki or via social messaging tools, help create transparency. The greater transparency and the more widely we can make our particular pool of information accessible, the less work for us, now and in the long run.
To clarify this change in strategy, in a operation of tidying up some of our loose ends today (and the mailing list is a big loose end), I wrote this email to all our mailing list signups :
Dear Kaplak Mailing List Subscriber,
You belong to a select group of people who once managed to locate our Mailing List at http://kaplak.com/ and find what we had to say there sufficiently interesting to sign up your email address for the list.
For a number of reasons, the Kaplak Mailing List didn’t come to play the envisioned role in our business strategy, as a communications channel. Instead we have focused on building a blog (now located at http://blog.kaplak.com/), which offers a number of RSS feeds for your convenience, which can be read using any feed reader you prefer.
As part of rebuilding our site structure, we’ve now taken all email adresses from the mailing list and grouped them in our GMail setup. We’ll maintain and add to this group to keep track of a larger group of people interested in Kaplak, including potential customers, investors, advisors, associates, developers and others generally interested. If you want to stay on this private list, you don’t have to do anything further. We’ll use this list only rarely, to direct attention to high points of interest. Among these, we’ll be sure to notify you when we launch our first product, the Kaplak Stream.
If you still want to keep up to speed with Kaplak, please follow our main Kaplak Blog feed here : http://blog.kaplak.com/feed/
We also use Twitter, Facebook, Identi.ca and a host of other online services. Find a non-exhaustive list on this page : http://kaplak.com/contact/ and feel free to connect with us any time on any of the online services we use, which are convenient for you.
On the other hand, if you want out of the mailing list, have become disinterested with Kaplak and don’t want to have more to do with us, please do mail us back and we’ll remove you from the list right away. We really don’t want to waste your time. We’d also really like if you said a few words about why you want to be removed from the list, if you care to share that with us.
One of the reasons hinted at in the email is simply financial. Our early customer meetings and experiences revealed to us that we had a very difficult time processing the knowhow gained into our system, at the speed we were generating it. We simply didn’t generate any income from our activities and had trouble financing our time.
Therefore, it became critical to us sometime in the spring of 2008 to focus on planning and executing a re-build of Kaplak’s root site and connected sites, in a way which makes it economically feasible for us to intake large amounts of information, and be able to apply this information to our business. The cornerstones of this re-build are the Kaplak Blog and the Kaplak Wiki, and what we call Kaplak Stream (working title). Kaplak Stream will be our first product and our first dash at connecting the dots and making niche producers more visible to their interested target markets.
This is a really important talk by Tim O’Reilly of O’Reilly Media, Inc. from the Web 2.0 Expo in New York. O’Reilly is known for being widely credited with inventing the term web 2.0. His talk is reminiscent of Guy Kawasaki’s appeal to ‘make meaning’ when starting a business or a nonprofit. O’Reilly’s urge is really simple : work on stuff that matters. Set high goals for yourself and your startup. No matter how things work out, you’ve done something which mattered.
Don’t waste your time trying to build the next cool time-waste application for Facebook or try to figure out how to tap into the money stream. You probably won’t get funded anyway, and if you’re funded, you probably won’t get the second round.
Build something which meets the problems, we face. You will profit and grow from your experience, even if you fail. We all fail, and that’s why we grow and become really good at something.
The video is about 30 mins. but it’s a really worthwhile watch. No bs. For some reason, the sound is not optimal, so the talk is best heard and digested with your earphones on. Thanks for the tip on this video to Start snakken!
I’m getting increasingly pissed off by this message, which appears every time I want to add someone as a connection using LinkedIn :
Please note: You should only invite people you know. Several recipients of your invitations indicated that they don’t know you. If enough recipients indicate they don’t know you, then you will be required to enter an email address to invite classmates in the future. More info…
Tonight, I just had it. So I wrote this email to the LinkedIn Customer Services Dept., which is shared below. Wanted to share it with you here, in case they do not comply. As I’ve said before, I’m not a big fan of these types of closed social networks, such as LinkedIn and Facebook and others. In fact, we don’t really like them, but we use them anyway, as long as they are beneficial to us and can connect us with people we wouldn’t otherwise be able to reach. But obviously there are limits. I don’t want to be insulted, and the above message comes pretty close to feeling like an insult to my intelligence.
So I wrote this email :
from Morten Blaabjerg
to cs@linkedin.com
date Sun, Oct 19, 2008 at 9:50 PM
subject Please remove annoying message
Dear Sir,
Can you please remove the message saying “several recipients of your invitations indicated that they don’t know you etc”… from my “Add connections” page? It is kind of annoying to see it there every time I check into that page, and there’s no imminent way I can remove it myself, it seems.
It simply spoils my good mood. If someone doesn’t remember me, is their business, and they can elect not to connect with me. I don’t care if they do not connect with me. If they don’t remember me, I can live fine without that particular connection.
But I take insult from repeatedly getting my good mood spoilt by being spoken down to like a baby every time I want to connect with someone using your service.
Alternatively, if you don’t want to remove that message, I would like to cease to use your services and have my complete account erased from your servers. And I’d like to have our LinkedIn group removed too. This stuff just gets on my nerves.
If LinkedIn does not comply and remove their system message from my screen, I’ll simply demand my accounts be erased and leave LinkedIn. I will also cease to recommend others to use it. I’ll focus on other networking services such as Plaxo Pulse or others, where I don’t have to be spoken down to every time I want to connect with someone. LinkedIn is useful and a fine tool, but it’s not life support.
Also, I forgot and should have given Customer Services a heads up, that I have never worked in that big company called Rubicon, which they constantly recommend I connect with employees from. I once co-edited a students’ periodical of that same name, though. It seems strange to me that LinkedIn cannot see, that these are very different entities.
We’re in the process of setting up our Planet-like website Kaplak Stream. I’ve done some extensive reading and testing of the two most prominent aggregation plugins for WordPress and WordPress MU : Guillermo Rauch’s WP-o-Matic plugin and FeedWordPress by Charles Johnson (aka RadGeek) of Feminist Blogs. This article will examine the pros and cons of both these plugins, in their present state.
Both aggregation tools are open source and distributed under a GPL license, which means that anyone may adjust the workings of these plugins and re-publish their version. They are each however developed and pioneered by one developer only, and rely heavily on the committment of their developers.
WP-o-Matic
WP-o-Matic is developed by 16-years old Argentinian wunderkid Guillermo Rauch, who has done a remarkable job. Schedules are very easy to organize. They are called campaigns, and each campaign can fetch as many feeds as you like. Campaigns are executed by cron, which runs on the server and executes the fetching script at specified intervals. If you can’t get cron from your web host, the WP-o-Matic script can be executed by Webcron. Webcron has been a free online service until recently. Now, the service must be paid for, however (at a very low price, one may add).
Pros
Wonderfully flexible customization options of each campaign, directly accessible from a brilliantly designed WP admin interface: specified expressions or URL’s can be transformed, and additional custom text or code added to each post in the campaign (such as ads). Great stuff.
Uses cronjobs for executing the script, which should provide the greatest reliability, if you can get it.
Cons
Doesn’t use timestamp of fed posts, if they are older than the time window set for the campaign. I.e. if a post is months old and you’ve set your campaign to fetch every hour, posts will be timestamped with the time of feeding it, rather than the original timestamp. This sometimes means older posts are published in the wrong or opposite order of the feed, which messes up the chronology of a blog. This, combined with the bugs which makes it difficult to re-run fetches without completely removing the campaign, makes correcting the timestamps a very tedious affair. If timestamps are important to you, this is a no-no.
Uses Unix/Linux cronjobs for fetching feeds, which is good if you can get it - and know how to set it up, but not all can or do.
Seems unreliable when used without Unix cron. Campaigns are not processed at all, or processed at the wrong time intervals.
Bugridden - small bugs such as campaigns not resetting properly, when reset. Complete campaigns and posts have to be deleted if one wants to re-fetch a feed to test a new configuration.
Uncertainty if the plugin is supported and developed further by it’s developer. Last release is from October 2007. Guillermo (who has now turned 17) recently announced his continued support for WP-o-Matic and the release of a new version in the near future, along with a new website specifically for this plugin.
FeedWordPress
I initially had problems with feeds from Google Reader (and Twitter, for that matter) - titles showed, but content disappeared. At first I thought this was a general problem with Atom feeds, but it turned out it’s because WordPress (even the latest versions) comes bundled with an outdated Magpie RSS parser. At first glance, the problem wasn’t fixed by exchanging the rss.php and rss-functions.php with the updated ones bundled with FeedWordPress, but reinstalling these files and re-entering the feeds did in fact solve the compatibility problems with Atom feeds. At first, coming from WP-o-Matic’s advanced campaigns setup, I wasn’t impressed with the interface provided by FeedWordPress initially, and the hazzle I had with Atom feeds gave me the impression that this plugin was no match for WP-o-Matic. But as I worked with it, FeedWordPress turned out to be an extremely competent agent for the job.
Seems to be the more stable and reliable candidate of the two. Works great with WordPress’ built-in cron alone.
Built-in API for WP themes and plugins to use
Maintained, supported and seems to be actively developed by the developer (last build 8 May 2008)
Works great with timestamps - fetches all timestamps from feeds 100% correctly.
Cons
Can’t add custom text or code to the posts of each particular feed, except if one utilizes the API. If one utilizes the API from a WP theme, custom changes will apply to all syndicated posts, when they are displayed on the site. This is a solution in cosmetics only, in that the custom layout and text is applied only in the visuals - and not reflected in the actual contents of a post. One has to access the API from within a plugin, which hooks itself up with an action or filter in WordPress, to actually ‘inscribe’ posts with custom text or code, which stays with the post, no matter how it is skinned or re-published by other sites. This requires a bit of PHP coding/hacking skills.
Can’t import tags. Tags can be imported by FeedWordPress as new categories, however, which somewhat alleviates the problem, but forces you to go with the category system over tagging or both.
Conclusions
Both these plugins reviewed here possess tremendous power, at the point of your fingertips. None of them are perfect, however, and both still need work, but I’m impressed with both. What they can do, and the power and speed of which these plugins work, is impressive. I’d love to have FeedWordPress feature the powerful customization scheme of WP-o-Matic, and I’d really like to have WP-o-Matic use the WordPress cron so reliably and steadily as FeedWordPress does. And I’d really really like to have WP-o-Matic just get timestamps right, with the ease of FeedWordPress.
However much I adore the flexible and powerful customization interface (the ‘campaign’ setup) of WP-o-Matic, we have to go with the more stable candidate of the two, which is FeedWordPress, IMHO. Especially since we can’t get cron right now, and are reluctant to pay for it right now, if we can get something which works great at this level, without paying for it.
We’re going with FeedWordPress, for these reasons mainly :
It works well, even without setting up cronjobs (using WordPress’ built-in cron).
It deals well with timestamps. There’s no messing around with the chronology of posts.
It is the best documented plugin of the two, and it has an API which makes it easy for us to tweek it for our uses.
And we have greater trust in it’s developer Rad Geek/Charles Johnson to continue support and development for this plugin.
When using free software plugins, I find picking the ones you want to use comes down to what killer feature you really want and which developer you trust the most to deliver it and continue development and support.
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