A comment about the first demonstrator got me thinking.
You may remember demonstrator AP1 is merrily harvesting what the DCC are blogging about on their three Blogger.com blogs. Just the posts, and any metadata that can be squeezed out of the newsfeed.
The comment observed that the demonstrator “seems to conflate all 3 blogs into one stream of posts”. Which it does. And the vanilla theme I’ve used for AP1 is deliberately plain – a basic blog-like layout. So the default view is the blog stack, latest on top. But options “By Author” and “By Blog” are also available. Other views are possible too – any kind of metadata-rich and feature-rich theme could be developed. It’s just a view, and since we are collecting blog posts as rich data objects, we can create as many different views as we like.
A view like this one would equally be possible:
ArchivePrints - A blog repository
Go on, take a closer look 
I suppose in terms of approach, this feels like it’s almost at the other extreme to Jim Groom’s WPMU archive, where every blog exists under one WPMU instance, with all its original content, colours, context, layout and theme – i.e. a complete clone (but for the moment only WordPress-to-WordPress).
Anyway, the devil may be in the detail, but whichever approach you prefer, it all seems eminently possible.
August 25th, 2009 at 12:06 am
Here’s an alternative view – would anyone prefer something like this?!