Introducing the Internet Topic Exchange
"Phillip Pearson is in the process of creating the Internet Topic Exchange. It is a central server to host TrackBack-powered channels. It's designed to let anyone effortlessly create a channel [like Lazyweb.org, KMPings and the sidebar in MovableBlog] to archive pointers to information on a given topic. Once a channel is set up [via a simple form], people can send links to their weblog posts to it using TrackBack or using a simple form. The resulting feeds can be read on the web and they are also available as RSS."
Matt Mowers: "With the Topic Exchange, it will be simple for users to cluster around topics simply by using them. [Related keywords: shared categories, shared topics, distributed metadata]. What might be interesting is to combine this with the idea of synonyms (from XFML) so that even when people don't use exactly the same topic name, if they are talking about the same thing, they can still cluster with everyone else!"
Ben Hammersley: "Movable Type makes this sort of thing easy to automate, by the way. If you, like me, use categories, the category attributes page has a box for TrackBack URIs to automatically ping."
Some days ago Scott Andrew asked Can Trackback power Directories? The Topic Exchange is pretty much exactly what he asked for. Some people won't like it though, as it is a centralized system, which may be the nature of a knowledge directory. But it takes nothing more than a Movable Type installation to set up own chanels (with stylesheets less horrific than the Topic Exchange Chanels one). And as it is extremely straightforward and simple, this might also be used as a Knowledge Management System that Actually Works (TM), at least for smaller teams.
