Some thoughts about content tagging, Mypage and newsletters

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12/3/2008 2:28:52 AM
McZosch
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Some thoughts about content tagging, Mypage and newsletters

Hi Joe!

I read in your  roadmap, that you plan to implement content tagging. Well, I have a few suggestions, maybe going somewhat beyond tagging.

  • I think, tags (or: categories) are a powerful tool to let people define their interests. After three failed attempts to get my users working with the "My Page"-feature, I am convinced, that tagging should be the way to go. People choose their tags of interests in their profile, and MyPage is generated accordingly. Much more simple, I think.
  • I think, the way MyPage is implemented is some other problem. It's a page, but no page you can make as every other page, so there is the break. Wouldn't it be easier, to have a MyPage-module, to be put on every page you like to?
  • Technology used on MyPage can in my opinion be used for the newsletter-feature as well. I think in the newsletter-module as-is, there is a break in functionality. Why not build the newsletter like a personalized MyPage, using the site-skin, built with modules specifically designated for Newsletter-use. Or personalized contents assembled via the interest-tags using a MyPage-module. This would produce not only more consitency with the look-and-feel of any other mojoPortal-feature, it would make the newsletter a much more mighty feature.
I'm looking forward to hear your thoughts about this.

Regards,

Markus
12/4/2008 8:36:30 AM
Joe Audette
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Re: Some thoughts about content tagging, Mypage and newsletters

Hi Markus,

Those are interesting ideas.

MyPage uses the ASP.NET WebParts technology which is not supported on Mono so I have no plans to use it elsewhere in mojoPortal. Its also does not produce the greatest html markup, it uses tables for layout. MyPage is designed to be the same concept as MyYahoo, or iGoogle, or NetVibes ,or PageFlakes.com. Its just a way for users to create pages from content exposed to them in the catalog. There is also a relationship with WebParts and Sharepoint so it may be possible to host Sharepoint WebParts in mojoPortal, though I have not tried it.

I'd like to implement drag and drop layout for the content system at some point but won't use WebParts technology to do it, I'll just use plain old ajax.

Populating MyPage based on tags seems interesting, but it also seems problematic if there happen to be thousands of things in particular tags. Not something I plan to work on any time soon. First I need to implement tagging in general and thats a big job as it is.

The idea of making newsletters like mypage is just not feasible, you can't do all that in email. The only way to do it is to bring the user to the site which is a goal of email, but they have to come to the site to get any kind of ajax experience, you can't use javascript in email and its very difficult to make email html templates that look like the site skin or anything very fancy. Email clients even web browser based ones are not like web browsers, you can't even rely on the images being visible and you are very limited in the way you can style things, you can't use external css and even internal css is not very reliable, often you have to use ugly inline style right on the elements to get consistent results across email clients.

Possibly we could personalize content in the email based on user preferences but it seems more simple to have more than one mail list targeted to specific things and the user subscribes to ones that interest them. Newsletter is very rudimentary now and needs more work to get full featured. I'll get to it when I can but its not my top priority at the moment.

Best,

Joe

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