Tim Yang’s Blog

I need some help with a project that I’ve been trying to get off the blocks for several months now. It’s called Nuposts.com and it’s a public hosted RSS aggregator. Basically if you’re a user, you can login and create a new publicly-accessible RSS aggregator page based on a specific topic. Let’s say, the topic is New York City. So every blogger from New York City will be able to login and add their RSS feed to the aggregator page and the latest items from their feeds will display on the page.

Eventually as Nuposts becomes more popular, each room will become a blogger community site for the topic of the page. Each room is like a blogring and meeting place for like-minded bloggers but with all the latest news from its members. If you want the latest news from the bloggers of New York City, just go to the Nuposts.com New York City page. Or if you want the latest about knitting, go to the Nuposts page where all the knitting bloggers hang out. Each room will eventually have optional community tools like forums and chatrooms and maybe even photo storage.

Nuposts, as a public RSS aggregator, allows anyone to create new rooms, as many rooms as they want. You can create rooms as specific as Chihuahua Fanciers in Johannesburg. And you can promote your rooms with built in publicity tools with the ability to search Blogger or Technorati to find other like-minded bloggers and email them about your new Nuposts rooms.

Nuposts has two kinds of target audiences:

Blog readers who are interested in a genre of blogs. They will be able to see which of their favourite bloggers has updated and be introduced to new bloggers of the same genre. They come back again and again to the room homepages to see what’s the latest in their favourite genre.

Second, Bloggers of a genre. Sharing in a Nuposts room reinforces their association with their chosen genre and they will be able to attract new traffic from Nuposts blog readers who are interested in their genre of blogs. They visit the homepage of their chosen genre once to tell Nuposts to get their RSS feed. But they will visit the forum again and again to parlay with other bloggers who blog about the same genre.

Right now, the project needs a couple programmers in PHP (or Ruby as the case may be) to help code the interface and the modules. I started the project off with a project description of the features, the timeline, the goals to be reached at each point of the project timeline and a wireframe of the homepage of each Nuposts room. It’s a big project. Really big. And the programmer who was working on the project had to leave because of work commitments.

I’m afraid there is no money. I have no funding. It’s all volunteer work until an angel comes along. If you’d like to help out, please do email me and I’ll give you more details and access to the project wiki. Thanks!

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 1st, 2005 at 10:22 am and is filed under RSS. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.