Jeff Jarvis at buzzmachine.com has called upon us to blow up blogs. I’m making a CMS system for artists (this site and my art site are the prototypes) that incorporates a wordpress blog and i’ve embedded it within my own menu system. I’ve not altered the look and feel radically from the Kubrick default, just tweeked it to fit in with my own design.

The issue here is that if you’re only concerned with the RSS feed then the look and feel doesn’t matter, plus if you only blog - and do nothing else then it can be good to use a very standard template, loads of blogs just stick with Wordpress Kubrick. There is something to be said about using a format that is familiar to you if you just want to read and search for stuff.

What I want to do is provide a site for artists so they can upload their portfolio online, edit their events and contact details online and blog with a news area. For this application people will visit the site to view the pictures and presentation is very important.

When I think about blowing up the blog I’m not thinking about presentation alone - what interests me more is the applications of the blog technology. Turning all sorts of other data into feeds, and interlinking different sites through that data. Flickr for instance is an image blog in essence, its feed can appear on your blog - or you could subscribe to it, but you will probably want to visit the site too. Id be interested to know if anyone has manipulated Flickr data in any interesting ways (other than a few thumbs on the sidebar like i have).

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 19th, 2006 at 1:25 pm and is filed under banter. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.