“Actually I can’t imagine they view the reader as, in any way, a publisher. Of course I think of everyone as a publisher, even if all they publish are a stream of articles they’ve read. Ultimately I think in 20 years there will be no such thing as someone who only reads.” – Dave Winer

1. The principle of reader-is-also-publisher is the basis for Cullect.
2. From what I’ve seen, it take 20 years to build a successful company. I think it’d be fantastic if Cullect could have 2 decades behind it.

Yes, we cover Cullect, relevance vs. timeliness, and trusted curators.

Listen to Kris Smith and Garrick Van Buren on Enterprise RSS [60 min]

Projects like Disqus and CoComment are trying to improve commenting – but I feel they’re still assuming we don’t already have a publication. We do. Lots of them.

Last night, Tom Elko and I dug into this topic for 2 hours and came out with some very interesting insight around re-thinking blog comments and Cullect’s current capabilities. All started from a very brief email he sent last week:

“I’ve been thinking, Culld and Cullect’s feature to publish a link with a comment to apps is probably the smartest commenting system out there for content based websites. A long thread after a post is fine, if you can get it…a discussion about the item on a reader’s social-network is waaaay better.” – Tom Elko

In Cullect, I’ve settled on ‘Recommend’ because – unlike other feed aggregators/readers/thingys – all reading lists in Cullect are public by default. So, here, everything is automatically, ’shared’ (even ‘hidden’ items) and ‘recommend’ makes the most sense.

“You have to build a service with the user/reader in mind or you won’t get any uptake. But if you can’t engage the content creator in your service, you’ll lose something important” – Fred Wilson

Exactly. From the beginning, I wanted Cullect to be useful to feed publishers as well as their readers.

There are a number of ways it’s doing that now,:

1. Readers can donate a percentage of their monthly Cullect subscription to their favorite blogger, podcaster, writer, publisher (yes, these donations directly impact a feed’s important ranking).
2. The Cullect Robot says which reading lists a feed is in and any monthly donation amount.
3. Cullect Feed Stats widget can display a feeds most important items or it’s recommended items.
4. Cullect recognizes comments-url tag and links to the original feed item.

• The Arik Jones: Authentication and posting to Tumblr.com
• The Dave Slusher: Link spidering
• The Hugh MacLeod: iPhoto-compatible RSS feeds
• The Peter Fleck: Authentication and posting to Blogger.com

Thank you all.

I’m postponing the release of Cullect.com – Big Train for a week while I revisit some of the UI decisions in the /profile section.

Until then, here’s a screenshot of the new reading list page. In the Flickr Notes, I’ve called out a few major things that are different. There are at least 5 more changes you can see if you’re familiar with Cullect.com

3 Comments

• At July 13, 2008, Michael Janssen wrote:

  I'll take a shot:

  1. 'Link' is now next to the title

  2. Send To... is now (I assume) a two-level click

  3. 'Close' is not visible (is it gone, or is it just not shown)

  4. "Customize" (that sounds exciting!)

  5. '2 Attached Files' instead of '.jpg .jpg .jpg .avi .avi'

• At July 14, 2008, Garrick Van Buren wrote:

  Michael,

  Exactly. Add in Twitter 'avatars' and I think we've hit everything.

  I moved 'Close' off the UI, it will still be available in the keyboard shortcuts.

• At July 15, 2008, Mike Keliher wrote:

  Holy sweet! It's too bad I have to wait a whole nuther week, but I'm looking forward to it.

Here’s a quick run down of what you can expect on July 16th:

• Integration with 7 more web services including corresponding keyboard shortcuts
• Cleaned up and simplified interface.
• Greater flexibility in:
  • sorting the items in your reading list.
  • presentation of your reading list.
  • the data displayed in the Feed Stats widget.

1 Comments

• At July 8, 2008, Mike Keliher wrote:

  Looking forward to it!

From the very beginning of development, I’ve seen Cullect less of a distinct destination (MapQuest) and more of an engine (NAVTEQ). In Cullect today, evidence of this perspective is all around (i.e. the sparse UI). In fact, the most requested features are responses to this engine-perspective.

Long term, I see Cullect still standing on it’s own as it does today. I also see Cullect as the underlying engine for sharing feeds within a number of services and platforms.

Drop me a line if you’re interested in integrating Cullect into your existing systems. Especially if you or someone like you is on the Cullect 1000 list.

“Unfortunately, I don’t want to sign up for a service JUST to aggregate all my other services.” – Jacob Sloan

Me neither. Cullect was built on the assumptions that; you’d rather not have yet-another-name-and-password to remember, you currently have an account that can be used to uniquely identify you, and well, you’re at least as lazy as I am.

Jacob on comment silos:

“With FriendFeed, my posts collect their own comments in various places that never ping back to my blog. These comments are never shared with regular readers.”

While I touched on this in the Comment Silo post, this is one of the benefits of the ’send to; blog, twitter, tumblr’ feature of Cullect. This spreads the meme, rather than keeping it hostage.

He continues with issue of context and distinct social groups

“I maintain a pretty unified social presence across all services, but for those who do not, connections originally from one social media service might be bored or offended by your social actions and blogging within another service.”

So many services (esp. feed readers) assume I want everything in one big pile and that I want to share the same info with everyone. That’s a recipes for information overload and spamming-you-’friends’.

Think of Meetup.com or 37Signals’ Basecamp, while there may be the same names and faces across the different groups and projects you’re a member of, it’s not assumed nor is it expected. Cullect is designed for sharing your different reading lists with the different groups of people in your life, not everything to everyone.

1 Comments

• At May 22, 2008, Mykl Roventine wrote:

  Very compelling. More FriendFeeders should read this. I love the concept of spreading/releasing the meme. It's what drew me to explore Cullect in the first place. Keep up the fight!