Hitchhikr – The uber conference aggregator
2 Cents Worth » Announcing hitchhikr.com
Leave it to Dave. One of my favorite things about his presentations are the way he handles his resources and ‘handouts’. He has a wiki for each presentation with hyperlinks for the information he has talked about. That’s cool. Oh yeah, since it’s a wiki, anybody can add their own notes or resources there as well. That’s also cool. He also has sidebar that aggregates any blog entries about that session, so when you look up the resources, you can see what other people had to say about it. That’s incredibly cool.
Now he’s taken that concept to the next level. Hitchhikr (spelling teachrs are going to hate that name!) is the uber conference aggreator. In a nutshell, it allows people to submit conferences, and then provides a single place to go that aggreates all blog entries, podcasts and photos. It’s heavy on the community involvement, in that people can add tags to conferences (for example to make sure that both NECC06 and NECC2006 are both tags for this years NECC) and also remove erroneous tags.
Of course there are RSS feeds throughout thte site, so you can subscribe to a specific conference long before it actually arrives. You can also subscribe to a list of upcoming conferences so you know what’s coming up.
I think there are going to be some bugs to work out still. Actually, maybe bugs is too strong a word. Details. For example, if I pull up NECC right now, I see a ton of my photos from last year’s NECC. More than likely, anybody pulling up NECC wants to see stuff about THIS year’s NECC. So perhaps we need to figure out some way to filter things out by date (nothing older than 8 months).
However, those are small details. The concept is fantastic and the site looks great. Go contribute!
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http://www.hitchhikr.com – page seems to be down?
How much better is this than Bloglines, anyway?
Jeanie
6/20/2006
Steve,
Thanks for the review. As for NECC vs NECC06, the person who submits the conference can edit their information. Part of the editing is to select the tags that should be suggested in the conference report, and the tag that will be the primary default tag, the one that comes up. For a conference like NECC, it makes sense to have a tag for the who conference (necc), and then one for each year (necc05, necc06). Prior to a conference, it makes sense to me to have NECC as the default tag, bringing everything NECC into the aggregator. As soon as the conference is only days away, I’ll switch the default tag to necc06.
This thing is just deep enough, that we’re going to have to come up with some protocols. I really need to add a blog to the tool so that I’ll have a place to talk about this stuff, and to solicit comments.
Hey, wish you were down here in Atlanta right now!
– dave –
David Warlick
6/20/2006
Jeanie, until the DNS goes through completely, you can get to it from http://72.32.88.194/hitchhikr.com/
While you could mimic it in Bloglines with quite a bit of time and effort, this provides people with a simple place to check out the traffic from any conference. From there, you can subscribe to an aggregated feed of forthcoming information about a conference with Bloglines if you wish, or you can just revisit Hitchhikr. The point is, instead of you creating feeds for every conference that aggregate the blogs and photos for all applicable tags, other people can do it for you and you can just grab the resulting feeds.
Heh, hope that made sense! Visit the site and share what you think of it!
Steve Dembo
6/20/2006
Got through to the website, Steve. Thanks!
Yes, I see what you mean. It sure makes things more organised.
Thanks for the recommendation!
Jeanie
6/21/2006