yelvington.com

At work this week we let another website escape from the zoo. Ruby Baboon is another take on the user-driven context engine concept: a metasite that pulls together lots of interesting stuff around a topic, all nominated and graded and ranked by users. It uses individual item nominations and RSS feed nominations from users, and pulls in related images and videos from Flickr and YouTube.

Ruby Baboon is all about celebrity gossip -- that addictive guilty-pleasure stuff that we all claim not to follow. Take a peek but don't let anybody see you do it. Use your home Internet connection. :-)

This doesn't reflect a strategic shift toward building national websites (or a fascination with celebrity scandal). It's really about what Scott Anthony talks about: Invest a little, learn a lot. Ruby Baboon and its sporty sibling FanaticZone Remix may become big worldwide hits but I am not holding my breath.

The real point is for us to launch a real-world test in a low-risk, low-cost setting, so that we can understand how these user-driven context engines work. You can't get there with a whiteboard and a bunch of meetings. Someday the concepts may find themselves in a local market, which is where our real focus continues to be.

Previously I wrote about six-week projects. This one took a little over a week, with much of the work done over the July 4 holiday by Nik Wilets and Ken Rickard. I think beer was somehow involved, along with the open-source platform Drupal.

At Morris DigitalWorks, where I do have a day job, we have another project in the hopper that we'll unveil next week.

Publishers create websites. But there's another approach, one that grasps the basic truth that the Web is already full of great content. That approach leads to metasites, and there are some great examples: Slashdot, Newsvine, About.com, Topix.net, Digg, and Beta.netscape.com.

Each, in its own way, is about a particular type of subject matter. But it's powered by OPC -- other people's content. It's all about linking, and the links in many cases are provided by/discussed by/graded by members of a community interested in/passionate about the subject that's on the table.

These sites often are mistaken for user-driven content engines. But the more important technique is a user-driven context engine.

Anyway, that's background for the thing we're going to unveil next week.

Consider it to be the equivalent of a concept car -- a technique the automakers use to learn whether an idea has legs or not. Only this concept car will have an engine. We'll let people drive it and see what happens.