The LogiLogi Foundation

Last wednesday I attended the discussion-meeting of the Dutch Internet Society called: “the unworkable internet”. It was about a Dutch ISP who was almost extradited to India for hosting the site of a foundation that was critical towards child-labor practices in some Indian companies… Especially scary about this is that no check or veto by an European judge is possible before extradition.

A defamation case in India, and a request from them is enough, even if no case like this would be possible in Europe because of the protection of free speech (and other human rights) we enjoy here. The treaties the Dutch (and many other western nations) have with countries like India often still stem from the 19th century, when the political and especially the technical situation was completely different. The closest thing one could do back then without setting foot on Indian soil was probably defamation over telegraph-wire. So surely there should change something here (and there)...

I (Wybo) am back from the PICNIC Conference in Amsterdam. It was totally 2.0. Many things were really outside the box, like the totally incredible analog red-fluid bottles SMS-screen, and what about a food serving dress ?

Anyway, it was definitely interesting, especially the European Bloggers Conference, with among others Corry Doctorow of BoingBoing, and many famous European and Dutch bloggers. And besides I also visited the Creative Money Salon, about the future of copyright and peer to peer creation, and the presentation of Syb Groeneveld’s great book about the future of civil society’s media, and the Digitale Pioniers Project; Open Doors, Programming Civil Society Media in the Netherlands, An Exemplary Guide.

The next conference on the roll is the T-Dose, which will be held in Eindhoven in two weeks, where the LogiLogi Foundation will present itself, it’s projects, and it’s view on Open Source web-applications during an hour-long talk.

OgOg.org has received a big code cleanup, and some new features, among which a Top 3 Posts of All Times listing, and the default listing of new posts since one’s last login. Also feeds and users are now tagged with the tags of their posts, which makes browsing the user- and feed-rankings quite interesting.

Also we are still looking for OgOg ambassadors, so have a look, get up, and lead your language :)

After the initial launch quite some non-english bloggers signed up and added their feed, and they gave us, among other things a multilingual tagcloud.

While diversity is great, and it’s true that many people do speak multiple languages, not many speak five. So the tag-cloud, and much of the site became a bit of a Babylonian language confusion, and they were not as usable as they were intended to be anymore. Also rankings could come out badly for non-english feeds using english tags, as some would vote down non-english posts.

So in order to allow the non-english-blogging of this world their playing-field, we launched five language-sites for OgOg today: Deutsch, English, Español, 日本語, and Nederlands.

Today OgOg received ‘I-have-already-voted’-checks. One is now allowed to vote for each post at maximum once a week. This law-in-code became necessary as more people joined OgOg.org today, and some of them liked to experiment with what would happen if they gave dozens of 5-star (unsurpassed) ratings to their own posts… ;)

Also I applied some tweaks to the layout of OgOg. I hope you like it.

And for something completely different; the development of LogiLogi Manta is proceeding nicely, but it’s a bit delayed. I hope to finish the code-simplification process this week, so we can integrate the stuff made by the Nijmegen-team around next weekend. Let’s hope we get an up-to-date pre-alpha online soon…

After our announcement on e-hub, and on a few forums, the word about ogog started to spread.

Today OgOg has been getting quite large numbers of visitors and today alone 10 bloggers signed up. Bet this is only the beginning…

Besides all this some improvements were made to OgOg in response to user inquiries:

• For the full articles you now go directly to the blogs themselves, so you get the full beauty.
• Viewpoints are now listed below posts on the frontpage as tag-viewpoints, for easy stats browsing.
• The voting-history of users & posts are visible now, so you can see who likes what you write.

Comments welcome,

Happy blogging!

We launched OgOg.org today, a side-project applying a simplified version of the the logilogi rating system to blog-posts from RSS-feeds…

You can take a tour here

On OgOg.org, you can rate RSS posts and receive good rankings and extra voting power when your own posts are rated as being good. You can carry your user-ranking and voting power over to other sites via OgOg’s API (and your OpenID).

Check it out and let us know what you think of it!