Feeding Everyone on forums.e-democracy.org – Sharing via Facebook

A little known GroupServer feature on http://forums.e-democracy.org is that everyone who posts on our public forums generates their own personal web feed. You can find it by pressing “more” at the bottom of your public profile. (Which you can find by clicking on your name on the web view of your posts or on the “Your Name (profile)” link on the top right when logged in.)

My profile is located at: http://forums.e-democracy.org/p/stevenclift

“More” links to this search query: http://forums.e-democracy.org/s/?p=1&t=0&a=stevenclift

All search queries on our forums site automagically generate web feeds (atom feeds for the techies out there). Mine is: http://forums.e-democracy.org/s/search.atom?s=&g=&a=stevenclift&t=0&p=1&f=0&r=0&i=0&l=6

If you have your own blog, consider using your own feed to display your recent posts in your sidebar or elsewhere.

If you use Facebook, try installing the My Blogs application and enter in your feed URL. This will add links to recent posts you’ve made on your local Issues Forum to your News tab on Facebook. Then your friends can see that you’ve posted and perhaps be drawn to join that forum as well. Very cool.

Another solution we are searching for is the best way to follow an Issues Forum via your Facebook experience. We strongly believe that you should be able to choose your preferred interface e-mail or the web for participation. That is how we maximize participation. Other online spaces tend to get isolated in one tool or another and that simply does not work when trying to build public ties among people who live near one another. Now Facebook is emerging as an “interface” where people like to spend time and organize the information coming their way on a daily basis. How might we encourage participation in Issues Forums from the Facebook experience?

Because each forum has a Posts by time web feed, instead of e-mail or even visiting our site you can follow a forum in a “news reader” like Google Reader, Bloglines, and others. There are some web reader applications in Facebook we are testing. Anyone out there have experience with feed reader application in Facebook? Anyone want to develop a Facebook application that would allow both reading and posting into selected Issues Forums?

Note that the web feed for a forum is a bit buried – from an Issues Forum group home page, select Latest Topics, then “Post in .. forum name,” then you’ll see the orange web feed icon. Or simply type – http://forums.e-democracy.org/groups/GROUPADDRESSBEFORE@/messages/posts.atom Example: http://forums.e-democracy.org/groups/mpls-staneric/messages/posts.atom