The O'Reilly Radar Launches
O'Reilly & Associates has launched The O'Reilly Radar -- a Movable Type-powered weblog we're proud to have been apart of the build team on.
O'Reilly CTO Rael Dornfest describes the blog's purpose in his announcement of the sites launch.
Our methodology is simple: we draw from the wisdom of the alpha geeks in our midst, paying attention to what's interesting to them, amplifying these weak signals, and seeing where they fit into the innovation ecology. Add to that the original research conducted by the O'Reilly Research group, and you start to get a good picture of what the technology world is thinking about.
One of the interesting aspects of our work on the Radar project was developing the necessary infrastructure for implementing a content folksonomy in MT. In addition to the tagging and indexing of content similar to del.icio.us bookmarks, we developed a means of producing tag visualization layouts in MT's templates. Like Flickr tag size indicates its volume, but we also added a gradient feature to indicate what Rael called its "entropy" -- a measure of its most recent use. The ability to query content based on tag intersections was developed, but not launched at this time.
Another interesting aspect of our work was the integration of del.icio.us bookmarks into the content of the site itself using the simplicity and power of RSS. The Radar editorial staff each maintain their own del.icio.us accounts and mark any bookmarks for publication with the tag "radar" Using our syndication feed plugin we periodically check each contributors del.icio.us feed for entries with the radar and collect them. Once cached on the Radar server, a specialized MTEntries tagset is used to select and sort the latest entries and bookmarks into a unified chronological layout.
Radar is just another example of the power and potential of MT-powered websites. Have a project or idea that needs help? Contact us.
