March 20, 2006

Making the Web Dance Friendly

I would like to work with others in the dance community to improve both the way we use the web and benefit from the web.

I'd like to start by encouraging dance bloggers to experiment with a service called Rojo.

Click for Larger Image

Screen Shot of Rojo
Dance Blogs Listed on Left
Most Recent Posts in Middle

Rojo is what is called a blog feed aggregator. Instead of visiting every blog you want to read, you can track all of the blogs you like in a single web-based application.

If you visit the Great Dance Blog's home page, you'll notice in the right-hand column that I've listed over 20+ dance blogs. One of the buttons for each blog reads, "Rojo." By clicking on this icon, you can automatically subscribe to the selected feed. You do first have to sign-up for a free account, which you'll be invited to do once you click on an icon.

But you can actually save time. Once you finish the sign-up process for an account, add me to your "Contacts." (I'm "dougfox" or "doug@greatdance.com"). Then, you can automatically subscribe to the same dance feeds I subscribe too - both dance and others. I would recommend against signing-up for all my feeds during the initial sign-up process. If you do this, you may end-up with a lot of feeds that you don't want.

In addition to subscribing to blog feeds with Rojo, you can also categorize and rate blog posts so that others can quickly learn what is interesting.

To categorize a blog post, you "tag" it. Tagging means that you add keywords that help you organize posts that you want to save for later reference. Tagging is very helpful because you can go back to Rojo at any time and quickly pull-up all posts that you have tagged, say, "dancevideo." And very importantly, every time you tag a post, you make it easier for other people to find stories that are of interest to them.

To rate a post, you simply click on the "Mojo" button to the right of every post. So when you are reviewing posts, you can see at a glance which ones have the most mojo - the most votes in other words.

But one of the best features is the ability to access the blog feeds, tags and favorites of other Rojo users. As I mentioned above, you can automatically access all of the dance feeds that I subscribe to by adding me to your contacts.

So even though I think that Rojo has some weaknesses - the main one is that the interface and navigation tools could be improved to some extent - I think that Rojo's combination of features can be a good first step in improving how dance bloggers and dancers in general use the Web.

For instance, if all dance bloggers and say hundreds of dancers signed-up for Rojo, then there would be a great community of dancers who would be contributing to evaluating, organizing and sharing dance resources. Plus a very likely outcome would be that many more dancers would be encouraged to create their own blogs. When I say dancers, I mean everybody involved in dance: professional dancers, students, choreographers, dance companies, educators, writers/critics, new media artists, technologists and others.

Rojo is one of the many web-based applications that are part of what is called the Web 2.0. The Web 2.0 usually refers to social networking services that enable groups of users to upload/save, share, categorize, collaborate, communicate and rate items with each other.

By starting with a service such as Rojo, we are categorizing just one type of content in the dance world - that is dance blogs and postings. But there are many other types of content that can be organized such as pictures, websites, and video. And there are many Web 2.0 applications for these types of content as well. I've been using Flickr for pictures, YouTube for videos and Del.icio.us for bookmarking websites. In terms of the categorization of dance content, I'd say Flickr is the farthest along.

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