digging into XMPP/Jabber pubsub again, for micropublishing

For the last few days I tries to relax by having some ideas how to make the micropublishing world a better place. I would like to be able to push information to some of my peers. Not only that I would like to save a bookmark at delicious and tag it with “for:someone”. I would like to have a more instant way to show them what gets my attention at the moment and what I think might interest them.

The weapon of choice for near real time information delivery is obviously XMPP. I will use publish-subscribe to provide information, by doing so any of my peers may or may not subscribe to a node onto which I publish information. And I will set up a hierarchy of nodes onto which I will publish different kinds of information. So here we go with the root node: home/b4mad.net/goern, this is mainly due to the fact that I use ejabberd2 to run my XMPP Server. There are a few subnodes:

• bookmark – for bookmarks that I send out, I need to figure out the format of published information
• micropublish – for twitter like things, that is basically Atom over XMPP
• media/stillimage – for a photostream…

As a good semantic web citizen I will note down what nodes exist at which URI and what they are used for. The first rough scratch is available.

For the moment there is a shell like Java application which accepts two commands: exit and purge, to exit the shell and purge off all items from the micropublish node. Any other words typed in the shell will be treated a an micropublish update and published as a Atom entry to my micropublish node.  The second application is a gateway to twitter.com: it is subscribed to my pubsub micropublish node and will pick up any atom entry and post it as a twitter update.

The next thing it write up is a process and format to publish my bookmarks and to have some nice GUI clients that can handle my updates… Or should it be integrated into WorkPress?!