/\  
	x-muh!( _ )      / o\ 
	    \ ~@ *~__   /o   \
	      (._.) |\  /___o\
	________|_|_|_____||__

That's how my IRC bouncer greeted me today :)

After heated debates in different blogs and a very interesting discussion on the (awfully named) bloggerbosse mailinglist, the proposed new and open swiss blogs list and the ping hub found a final home: Alain generously made available his blogug.ch domain

* list.blogug.ch
The new and hopefully final home of the open Swiss blogs list. Everyone can now contribute to that list, maintain his own blogs (after you claimed them), tag them and helping out as admin. The basic idea of this list is to provide an exhaustive list of swiss blogs, which anyone can use for their own purposes. The data is licensed under a Creative Commons License and everyone is invited to use it for their own projects like an aggregator or something else, the ideas are unlimited. As the blog owners can tag their blogs, it's also possible for aggregators to just get the blogs with a certain tag. This makes it possible to for example build an aggregator with only political blogs. There's already a help page of how you can get those blogs as an OPML document. More features are planned for the future. Very big thanks to Patrice for coding all that and to Matthias of blog.ch for providing the initial batch of 700+ Swiss blogs.

And to make it clear, that service will not be just another aggregator. It won't aggregate blog posts, its main purpose is to provide a list of Swiss blogs for others to build such things on top of it.

So, go ahead, claim (or add) your blog and tag it accordingly.

* ping.blogug.ch
Beni and me were coding on another "community service", a so called ping hub. Its main intend is to be something like ping-o-matic or weblogs.com just for Switzerland. Aggregators or other services can add their ping url to the ping hub (just mail us or make a comment below) and they then will be pinged as soon as someone pings the ping hub and therefore immediately notified if a blog was updated.

Blog owners are of course encouraged to add http://ping.blogug.ch/ to their pinging services list (otherwise the whole thing won't work :)).

In wordpress, add http://ping.blogug.ch/ in wp-admin > options > writing > update services.
In Freeflux/Flux CMS, go to Site-Options and add it to the "blogWeblogsPing" option (freeflux.net currently pings it by default).
For other software, it should work similar.

There's also an XML file available with the latest blogs, which pinged us.

Again, the basic idea here is to provide other services with a useful service and not to build something on its own (and to avoid, that every aggregator has to pledge its "users" to add him to the "ping services" list)

* top100.blogug.ch
The top100 list also got a nicer URL, it will also use the list of list.blogug.ch in the future.

* *.blogug.ch
Alain, the owner of the blogug.ch domain is happy to give out more subdomains for similar "community" projects. Just get in contact with him, if you have a nice idea.

And as you certainly noticed, design is somehow missing. If anyone wants to provide a nice design for all the *.blogug.ch projects, do not hesitate to get in contact with us.

And now, start adding your blogs, ping us and build new exciting tools on top of the existing ones.

Just read in a comment on digg.com:

The UK is not known for installing a camera in every outlet of every street corner everywhere in order to "catch criminals" (read: they like some privacy and sometimes they're a little slower on the tech curve).

And he sounds quite serious on that opinion. Hilarious and obviously never been to the UK :)

After my last entry and concrete action by Patrice and Red, Matthias opened a mailinglist for the discussion of a "Open Swiss Blog Directory" to get all interested people together. See Matthias' blog post for more info.

I didn't want to comment on the whole who-owns-which-swiss-blogs-urls discussion, but here are my 2 cents anyway...

I was surprised to realize on Friday that the blog.ch OPML file was gone (I need it for the Top 100 list). I knew Matthias had some "trouble" with other new aggregators, so this wasn't totally unexpected and I don't want to further comment on if Matthias is right or wrong. But OTOH he never really stated under which conditions this OPML file was available, so you can't really blame the others for taking and using it :)

I have now again access to the OPML list again, but it's a pity it isn't available to everyone anymore as such projects like the top100 list are not possible anymore (or not possible with such a low entry barrier...)

Anyway, nothing new, everything said already, but I think the whole mess begs for a solution and here's my proposal:

Create a "aggregator-independent" Swiss Blog Directory.

It may be super simple for a start, but could grow on features with time. My basic idea is, that everyone subscribes and maintains his blog data at one central place. Those URLs are then republished under some CC license (as OPML or whatnot), so that everyone can use it (and do with the data whatever he wants).

Later one could add features like Blog Claim (like in technorati, to be sure it's your blog), category and language fields and maybe as much as important after these few days, under which terms you want to have your blog republished (commercial sites? Just title? Full Content?).

This way, the aggregators don't have to waste time on collecting the data and investigating at copyright issues, but have one nice source for all this and they can concentrate on implementing new exciting features instead of boring data mining :)

One other feature could be a central place for pinging when you publish a new blog post, so that your article is immediately published on the aggregators as well. As far as I know, no aggregator supports that feature today, but having a single place for swiss blogs (like weblogs.com for everyone in the world) could solve some scalability issues...

I know Matthias did put a lot of work into his list and it's not that easy to keep it clean and up to date. I don't want to check each new entry, but with some kind of community check, false and spam entries could be spotted quite efficiently,.

Again, this list wouldn't be an aggregator itself, it would just publish the blog url list and maybe check from time to time, if the blog is still online. And all the data published for each blog is in the responsibility of the blog owner and not some single group or person. There have to be criteria on who's allowed to be on the list at all, but I think, those should be quite lax. The aggregator people still can exclude blogs they don't like from that list on their own and for example only use blogs from one language or category.

Just an idea, not sure if anyone's interested at all for something like this, but I think, it's a win for everyone, especially also for the blog owners, as they don't have to submit their blog on dozens of pages to be included (if they want to :) )

Wow, you can almost see anything on that picture :)
The concert was great, but the walking home through half of Zurich a little bit freezy ( we didn't manage to read the night bus time table correctly...).