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.
Comments
Flinging poo
Quoth the Ruby Baboon 'About' page, "It looks like the site was built by baboons!" As the architect Edwin Lutyens said of the Indian city of Simla, "If one was told that the monkeys had built it all one could only say (would be): 'What wonderful monkeys - they must be shot in case they do it again'".