After thinking a while about Chris's post here, I'm wondering if there might be a need for a simple, one stop solution for distributed content and distributed authentication between music sites.
Here's what I mean:
You have your music site with all the normal drupal features. It's doing a good job managing your band's content and music. Using views you can even create dynamic RSS feeds for other sites to subscribe to your content. Similarly you could use aggregator to subscribe to other RSS feeds of your friends site. But setting up aggregation and finding feeds to subscribe to is a pain (and somewhat boring).
It'd be really cool if one site could add another site as a "friend" and the feeds were setup automatically in one click and organized in a logical way. And your friend's site would show up under a list of "friends" similar to a myspace friend. Let's call this theoretical module, "musicswap".
So let's say Site A has this "musicswap" module installed...the owner of Site B realizes they share a lot of things in common and also has this module installed. Site B requests to be friends with Site A, and Site A approves the request. Now they both share data and users between sites.
I know there has been previous work on the idea of two sites "syncing" together...and I'm not suggesting a completely robust and flexible solution for all applications of website content sharing...I propose something extremely simple and focused just for bands.
The components of a proposed Music Swap Module
- A common musicswap taxonomy to categorize content with terms like
- announcement
- event
- audio
- image
- video
- A simple request form for one site to request being added as a friend to another site
- An RSS feed that publishes everything that matches the musicswap taxonomy with category tags
- An aggregator page that takes all of the site friends feeds and makes nodes out of the items, applying the category terms
- A way to share user information across sites (possibly OpenID could take care of this)
I think the pieces are there for publishing (RSS), subscribing (aggregate), and organizing (common taxonomy) content between sites...the only thing needed is a really simple way for sites to agree on how to swap this information.
I haven't done a ton of research on this or worked out details, so if anybody has any links or has ideas on the topic I'd love to hear your thoughts.
Comments
quick one..
Hi Zirafa,
I think you're over complicating it a little.
Tweaking standard RSS feeds is enough to get going with, rather than a fully blown module for distribution of content. Specific artist/band related documentation for the contemplate.module (which allows RSS theming) would suffice.
In other words, a few handbook pages explaining to bandsite webmasters how to theme their RSS feeds for gigs/releases/news etc. would be more than sufficient.
The out-of-the-box feeds that come with Drupal work very well with sites like NETVIBES.COM, by the way, which allows fans to aggregate feeds with 2 clicks very easily and simply. They even have a myspace and last.fm plugin, which is interesting..I'm guessing it's just a scraper, but, it works quite well.
By approaching it that way (handbook helper pages for theming feeds),not only can other bands take feeds, but, music fans can as well (whether it's for their own bebo.com page or netvibes page or whatever)
Distributed authentication is a different kettle of fish. I think that does warrant a dedicated module and centralised HUB. Perhaps that might be something for drupalart.org? in other words, that's the centralised 'authenticator' hub for artist sites, in a similar way to how Drupal.org is the hub for Drupal distributed authentication.
Does that make sense?
If it does, the way it might work is that a fan registered at the site for ARTIST AAA, can log into the site for ARTIST BBB. That's acivated by webmaster for ARTIST AAA visiting Drupalart.org and saying that "'yeah, we would like fans of Artist BBB to be able to login to our Artist AAA site using their ARTIST BBB details".
Which is a slight variation to how the distributed authentication that comes with Drupal out-of-the-box works, but, I think that would work very well.
There are a lot of values to distributed authentication like this, but one of the major ones I can think of is fanbase-cross-pollination and helping to curb ticket touts/scalpers.
Anyone know if there been any similar implementations of distributed authentication for other sectors/applications besides music?
Dub
Theming normal feeds would
Theming normal feeds would help too...but I think the real barrier is aggregation of other site's feed. Generally these feeds are being used for personal subscriptions, but I'd like to see that expand to sites aggregating other sites. Currently the drupal aggregation module is lacking in a lot of ways, and that's what makes me think having a special module would help make it easier. But, I now see that a special module is probably the wrong approach.
However, I think a much improved and 2-click aggregation module would pretty much solve what I'm talking about. Basically each site can very easily customize RSS feeds with views, but it is kind of difficult to manipulate incoming feeds. In other words, broadcasting is simple, receiving is complicated. Drupal receiving feeds would open lots of doors for interesting aggregation of music content (which was sort of the goal of this proposed module).
Now that I've thought about it some more, improving core aggregator.module is a better answer than what I've proposed above. There are other aggregation modules out there but none allow the level of customization I'd like to see. In Flash one of the most powerful tools is that it can "learn" xml schemas. You "teach" it by feeding in an example feed, it parses the structural schema of the feed. You then can map the incoming feed to content or other parts of the site. It's really cool and very powerful, and isn't limited by the type of XML file you give it.