Long in the works, my O’Reilly Media–pub­lished “Web 2.0 Mashups and Niche Aggre­ga­tors” is avail­able. The title could sort of be boiled down to “hey this Quak​erQuaker​.org thing has become kind of neat” but it’s more than that. I wax lyri­cal about the dif­fer­ent kind of aggre­ga­tor com­mu­nity sites and I throw a new tongue-twister into the social media arena: “folk­so­nomic den­sity” (Google it now kids and you’ll see the only ref­er­ences are mine; a few years from now you can say you knew the guy who coined the phrase that set the tech­nos­phere on fire and launched Web 3.0 and ush­ered in the sec­ond phase of the Age of Aquar­ius, yada yada).

A hun­dred thank you’s to my fine and patient edi­tor S. (don’t know if you want to be outed here). I’ve been an edi­tor myself in one capac­ity or another for fif­teen years (I’ve some­times even been paid for it) so it was edu­ca­tional to expe­ri­ence the rela­tion­ship from the other side. I wrote this while liv­ing an insane sched­ule and it’s amaz­ing I found any time at get all this down.

As luck would have it I’ve just got­ten my design site at Mar​tinKel​ley​.com up and run­ning fully again, so I hope to do some posts related to the PDF in the weeks to come. In the mean­time, below is the mar­ket­ing copy for Web 2.0 Mashups and Niche Aggre­ga­tors. It is avail­able for $9.99 from the O’Reilly web­site.

Web aggre­ga­tors select and present con­tent culled from mul­ti­ple
sources, play­ing an impor­tant taste-making and pro­mo­tional role. Larger
aggre­ga­tors are start­ing to com­pete with main­stream news sources but a
new class of niche and do-it-yourself aggre­ga­tors are orga­niz­ing around
spe­cific inter­ests. Niche aggre­ga­tors har­ness the power of the inter­net
to build com­mu­ni­ties pre­vi­ously sep­a­rated by geog­ra­phy or insti­tu­tional
iner­tia. These micro-communities serve a trend-setting role.
Under­stand­ing their oper­a­tion is crit­i­cal for those want­ing to
under­stand or pre­dict cul­tural change and for those who want to har­ness
the power of the long tail by cater­ing to niches.

Every­one can now add posts to the Quak­erQuaker cat­e­gory list­ings. Sim­ply book­mark the post in Del​.icio​.us, list the QQ cat­e­gories and it will be added to the page.
For exam­ple, say you’ve seen just the coolest post on Con­ver­gent Friends. Go to the “Con­ver­gent Friends”:http://www.quakerquaker.org/convergent_quakers page to find the right “tag”–in this case “quaker.convergent”. Book­mark the post you like, write a title and descrip­tion and list “quaker.convergent” as its tag. An hour or so later the post will show up on the Con­ver­gent Friends page. How cool is that? Here are “instruc­tion on how to use Del​.icio​.us and title pages”:http://www.quakerquaker.org/contributors_zone_how_to/.

Con­tinue…