[http://metaphoricalweb.ning.com/profiles/blogs/an-experiment-towards-the]
Social networks are finicky things - to develop a community of
interest, you need to have both a compelling topic and a reasonable
platform on which to host that community. I've been working with Drupal
for several years now, and while I thoroughly love Drupal for its
extensibility, in order to build a community of any complexity, you end
up having to make so many modifications and add so many modules that
the system can become glacially slow.

I stumbled upon Ning recently, though I've been on Ning networks before
without realizing it, and found that I could put together a serviceable
site that offered almost every capability that I'd been looking for in
about twenty minutes. It's also separately hosted, which solves a lot
of the concerns that I've had with my own self-hosted site at
http://www.xmltoday.org, especially given the high cost of hosting and
my own rather precarious financial state at the moment. Given those
concerns, and of course the option of playing with a new social media
environment, I decided to set up a Metaphorical Web ning site.

I want to open this up to participation by anyone interested in the
primary topics of the site. What are those, you ask? (You did, really,
I heard you about to say exactly that! Really!!). Well, what I'm going
to cover here moves beyond what I cover on xmltoday.org, which focuses
purely on XML issues, though I'll be covering that too. However, with
Metaphorical Web, I have a somewhat broader agenda.

Specifically, the following topics come to mind:


- The Metaphorical Web Side This is devoted more to future topics and
issues
- The New Publishing - neo-journalism, social networks, CMS's, DITA,
DocBook, Drupal, Twitter, SVG, etc.
- The Architect - discussions about the profession of information
architects, software design, programming, methodologies, and so forth.
- Macro-Economics and Systems Theory - Everything from relevant
economic discussions to software agents to the Sims
- Climate Change and Green Tech - A look at everything from climate
change related stories (pro and con) to solar energy to infrastructure
issues.
- TomorrowVille - A change to play futurist, looking at trends and
patterns that will shape our future.
- The XML Side This is devoted to XML related topics in particular
- Open Standards - W3C, OASIS, IETF, ECMA, and just about anyone else.
- XRX Technology - XQuery, XSLT, XForms, RESTful Services, XProc and
other Xy things
- XBRL and Open Data - includes NIEM (and NIEM IEDPs), GML, ePub and
other governmental XML standards, as well as looking at the
intersection of IT and government.
- The Semantic Web - RDF and RDFa, classification, taxonomy, OWL,
SPARQL, and the way that we organize information.
It's a fairly daunting list, and is no doubt incomplete. My desire here
is to pull together people that are interested in the trends of
tomorrow, from the technologies to the social issues to how we actually
survive on this planet. Feel free to join the group, to blog, to create
new discussions, to post your events or your photos, to make yourself
at home. Think of this as a debate salon, a place to discuss the world
with others, and to put in your two cents worth.

I will be maintaining the XMLToday.org site as well, but will continue
the trend that I've started with it and keep it strictly focused on
XML-related news exclusively. This site I'm hoping instead to focus on
building community. Enjoy, kick back, and stay for a while.

Kurt Cagle
Managing Editor
The Metaphorical Web
http://metaphoricalweb.ning.com

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Posted By Kurt Cagle to Metaphorical Web at 5/07/2009 09:53:00 AM

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