We are developing an app called pagebox.es with a different focus but which could be used as an alternative.
We have links, files and notes as well, but we'd like to get better at structuring and sharing other kinds of contents, and turn the collections into simple sharable databases with a friendly front.
Although I got to say that it isn't as elegant as Kippt and Sendtoinc, maybe someday ;)
We've never compared ourselves to Trello, it makes me think that we could make the nestable lists more explicit and promote this note-taking use. As for how long we will last, it's always hard to say, but we won't take down the server, and in any case be assured that before that I'll help everyone to take every byte safely elsewhere, via zip, sql dump, csv, spreadsheet, plain html + css, written in clay tablets.. I mean, I'll be your export module, If you need me to programmatically push it to other service with an API I'll do it, trapping the contents of someone else makes me feel terrible.
"data blogging" sounds awesome, never thought of those words. I'm pretty much addicted to RSS Feeds, for me there's no better way to access those contents. Being able to translate that experience to structured data would make very happy.
Reading your tumblr post, I think there is useful work to do on the points you mention:
Collecting and List Making // Visualising Knowledge // Open Access. We need something simple enough to get the people who already know how to publish posts interested.
Silk is pretty good, and I never heard of Freebase. From wikipedia: "Freebase is a large collaborative knowledge base consisting of metadata composed mainly by its community members. It is an online collection of structured data harvested from many sources". I got to look into this, sounds beautiful.
Yes, I was talking about Pagebox. The current version is more like a page builder with some structured data, but we've always dreamed of turning it into a "github of content data", if we can call it that. We are thinking of changing the interface and emphasize the ability to navigate and search, possible something like a mac finder / itunes style of dashboard.
I love the idea of helping build these community databases and make those contents searchable. I see a challange in the fact that this means adding another channel to discuss contents different than the one they already use, but the promise of making those contents easier to reach might make it worth it.
As for the blog problem, I'm in a similar situation. A blog seems to have some lifespan, and there are some raw contents that I would like to have available without worring about a domain name and the design decisions of CMS theme. I have my own particular "delicious", some comments about different articles, a bunch of photos, and many screenshots and mockups from the different projects I've been working on that I would like just to publish without fuzz (Ideally: add all my project folders. Done). It won't be as beautiful as those web portfolios but I don't need that, I want convenience, I don't like abondend blogs either and I have 3 or 4...
Reading these comments gets me really motivated, thanks!
We’ve working on an approach to tackle this problem. We saw that the burden of having to create a data structure - along with the need to attach it to a visualization - makes people post what they can as hacky html lists, if they get so far.
We wanted to show people that they were in fact able to create structured contents, even if it was in a limited way, and we choose the analogy of file and folders since most people know how to organize them. But structuring and gathering data is half of the problem, you need to translate that data into friendly views and same sort of browsing experience, so we developed same conventions to turn the structure into a small website/embed.
We thought of developing an open way to store and share this data, and let people copy, follow, contribute to these chunks of content. Build a friendly web dashboard that exposes every item with simple views, and which let other developers consume them in any other ways they want.
The problem is that we don’t really know who wants this. We thought that it would be appealing for web agencies as a way to quickly add structured contents to websites, but we were wrong. Some people suggested us to develop a full CMS, but we wanted to work on the problem of sharing and opening up a library of contents, not to be an alternative to Wordpress. We honestly don’t know what to do next. If you want to talk further about it, my email if fsainz/gmail.
The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe it's pretty good, they promote critical thinking with humor and they give some nice insights into the mechanisms we usually use to judge information.
We have links, files and notes as well, but we'd like to get better at structuring and sharing other kinds of contents, and turn the collections into simple sharable databases with a friendly front.
Although I got to say that it isn't as elegant as Kippt and Sendtoinc, maybe someday ;)