Next steps for the new site

We’re now beginning work on the new version of the Science Blogging Aggregated site.

We’d like to have a working prototype of the site ready for the ScienceOnline conference in January.

Realistically, by then we’ll probably be able to implement the following features:

• Users login and register blogs
• Some sort of administrative check-off on registration, with anti-spam measures
• Aggregator compiles entries from registered blogs, displays on home page
• No tagging of individual posts, but blogs are categorized by user-specified “themes”
• Visitors can filter posts appearing on home page by theme

We may also add a language filter allowing users to specify their preferred languages. (This may be difficult to implement because it would require having curators in each language we support) Over the long term, we would like a multi-lingual interface, so all users can experience the site fully in their native language.

We are leaning towards a dense, information-rich layout for the home page, much like the existing home page, but with additional tools for users to filter posts, login, register, and so on.

In order to maximize the site’s utility, we are thinking about pre-populating the database. This would probably be a manual process, based on the existing feeds for ScienceBlogging.org. This would require an additional feature so that users could “claim” their blog and personalize their account. However, we’re not sure that’s doable by the January deadline. If readers can suggest models for how claiming a blog could work, with a minimum of fuss, we’d appreciate suggestions.

We are also considering a a new domain name for the site—we’d like it to be a truly notable name, one that’s memorable, says something about the site, and isn’t easily confused with some of the other science sites currently out there.

So here’s our plan for the next steps. We’ll keep you up to date as we continue to work on the project:

1. Develop a schema for a database that can handle the trimmed-down version of the site that we’re planning for January, but is flexible enough to meet our long-term goals
2. Arrange for site hosting. We can work on our existing personal server space for now but we’ll need a permanent home, and the sooner we find it the better.
3. Wireframe the first (limited-feature) version of the site: Create a template that developers can use to build the system, indicating what information will go on each page. Again, we may want to do this in anticipation of the higher-functionality site to come, so we don’t have to constantly reinvent the wheel.
4. Explore the process of creating a non-profit organization. This may be a larger non-profit that also includes ScienceOnline.
5. Create a schedule for the process of developing the site up through the conference.
6. Recruit additional help. We’re really short on programmers and designers. Any volunteers?

Building a better aggregator: Goals, Tagging

The ScienceBlogging site you see now was always intended to be a temporary solution. What we really need is a site that not only aggregates blog posts, but also allows users to classify them, search them, highlight their favorites, point their friends to them, and do many other things we haven’t even imagined yet.

Behind the scenes, Bora, Anton, Jessica, Mark, and I have been discussing how to do that, but we realized that limiting the discussion to just ourselves is depriving us of a valuable resource: The people who’ll be using and contributing to the new site.

So, over the next few days, I’ll be offering some thoughts about how to proceed and inviting your comments. Our plan is to have at least a partially functional, working prototype of the new site by the ScienceOnline conference in January 2011. Let’s get that started right now by discussing the goals for the site.

Goals
Here are the goals we came up with for the site:

• To be a central site where scientists, media, other experts, and laypeople see what scientific topics are being discussed on blogs, in real time
• To be a resource for locating past discussions
• To promote science blogging and other online discussion of science
• To promote scientific accuracy and avoid pseudoscience and crackpottery
• To be encyclopedic and inclusive
• To be searchable and filterable
• To have a system (or multiple systems) for highlighting discussions and posts that are especially topical / high quality
• To have a means of removing or hiding posts that are not scientific (e.g. vacation photos, political rants unrelated to science, etc.)
• To be multilingual
• To be open source / open access

Should anything be added, changed, or removed?

Tags
One of the first considerations will be how to keep track of all this information, and a huge key to that will be classifying it. That’s why we think it will be essential to have a unified tagging system in place. If bloggers don’t select their primary tags from a central list, then it will be difficult for users to find posts on the topics that interest them. On the other hand, if bloggers must visit our site to choose primary categories, then usage will suffer. We can allow bloggers to set default tags for their posts using their registration page, but there should be some way to override those settings for individual posts, still using our list of preferred tags.

Could we create a WordPress plugin for this? Or adapt an existing plugin? What about other blogging platforms? What about templates that don’t support tags? One possibility is using a bookmarklet, which would be platform neutral but not ideal. Any other ideas on how to implement a tagging system?

That’s just the first bit — there’s a lot more to discuss, but we thought this would be a good way to get the conversation started. So please, let us know what you think in the comments.