From Kaplak Blog. Promoted by Kaplak Stream
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).
Tags : back of the napkin, Community, feed imports, Google, greater tools, Kaplak Stream, long tail, niche products, peer production, rss, search, separate systems, tagging, web contexts, Web Publishers
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