Besides questions about the business model (described in the previous post) - some people also asked us about the mash-up that we put together to make this all work.

So here is a quick overview of the moving parts of the systemr:

Aggregation and republishing:

One of the most important elements of the Hubs is a product called MySyndicaat. MySyndicaat allows us to combine all feeds into one - while excluding posts that have the "nocorante" word in it, or by only allowing posts that contain other tags to enable some contributors to cross-post across hubs. Giovanni Guardalben at MySyndicaat has been gracious enough to customize some of MySyndicaat to enable us to do things like recognizing the "norcorante" term even if it is commented out in html, or to enable us to convert certain feeds on the fly to comply with our standards. We now also use MySyndicaat to convert the bio pages into RSS feeds and since MySyndicaat stores all of the Corante Hub history, we plan on using it for very specific search and remixing purposes as we move forward as well.

The combined feed-stream comes into Movable Type through reBlog - where we strip out the title, the author, and an excerpt for republishing purposes, as well as the category to categorize posts and populate the tag cloud. As you may have read elsewhere, Bud Gibson from The Community Engine was totally instrumental in getting that up and running.

Organization and discovery:

On the information organizational side of things we have the classic MT archive options as well as the tag-cloud mentioned earlier - which can be sorted by recency, frequency, or alphabetically. We are planning on adding more reader-driven remixing capabilities moving forward as well.

To help users find other posts that may be related to those that are being published in the hubs, we are getting related posts from Waypath. And to help them track the conversations better, we are using Icerocket's inlinks in addition to the available trackbacks.

For search we partnered up with Rollyo - where we first developed "Corante Network"-specific search engines - which are also tied into our advertising system. Along with our contributors, we are planning a few other things with Rollyo very soon - so stay tuned!

Subscriptions:

We use FeedBurner to republish feeds that Corante Hub subscribers might want to subscribe to, and also joined the FeedBurner RSS advertising network to put ads in our feeds. FeedBurner is also developing some other widgets which we will be integrating as soon as they become available. Readers can also subscribe via email with Feedblitz - where we joined their publisher program, which enables us to customize the look and feel of our subscriptions.

We plan on adding richer subscription options as we move forward - enabling people for example to subscribe to parts of the tag cloud.

We are always looking for more and better ways to help our readers find, subscribe, discover and organize the information which they are getting from our hubs.

But we also know that we may be missing key components - so iif there is anything out there that you think might help us make this a more productive and enjoyable reader experience - please let us know.

[Technorati Tags: corante mashup corante hubs]

Many people have applauded the launch of the Corante Hubs, with some asking what our business model looks like.

Here is an attempt at demystifying that question without being overly committed to the answer - as we have embarked on a "sense and response" strategy that does not just involve ourselves but also our contributors and our readers. At the risk of sounding too theoretical, in many ways what we're trying to do is to push the envelope in search of the next generation publishing model that might be a better fit for this new social medium - and we are co-developing that model with the market.

Our first and most important goal is to provide value to our readers. By teaming up with the Corante Network of expert contributors and by enhancing their writings, opinions, or other content at the hub level with both technology components and add-on editorialized content - which acts as a second layer of human "filtering" - we feel like we can provide a truly rich topic-specific destination for our readers, the innovators and early adopters in their space.

Our second important goal: to provide value to our contributors. And by doing that, we further enhance the value that we deliver to our readers - making for a nice "increasing returns" relationship between Corante, our readers and our contributors. Two of the services that fall into that category - and which are just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what we're planning on doing - are the Corante Symposia and the Corante Seminars.

Corante Symposia are face-to-face events that are being put together in partnership with our contributors. The first one - the Symposium on Social Architecture, produced in collaboration with the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at the Harvard Law School, as a great success (as well as a super learning experience). In the planning pipeline we have Symposia on Marketing, Media, Future of Software and many others. The idea is to create opportunities for our audiences and our contributors to meet face-to-face in the context of topic-specific discussions that are a few steps ahead of where you might find the discussion at more traditional events. Those events also produce a wealth of new insights and intelligence that will find their way back to the hubs and the network and may be packaged in other forms.

The Corante Seminars - which are planned for launch early next year - enable some of the Corante contributors to deliver high quality workshops, seminars and training sessions to our audiences online and on a semi-regular basis. Again - this will result in a symbiotic relationship between readers and contributors that will eventually benefit everyone.

The business model for this part of our business? It's a bit like politics: if we can create that many touch-points between market innovators and influencers and those following them across that many different channels, that has a a lot of value to companies trying to reach the and develop relationships with audience in an age of severe attention scarcity.

Oh - and did we mention that we're not averse to embracing those aspects of the traditional publishing models that work? We'll of course be selling ad placement on Corante.com but also on the hundreds of blogs with which we'll eventually partner and believe that to be a very compelling value proposition to marketers looking to get premium placement in front of an extremely engaged, influential, affluent audience. In that vein, we'll be continuing the work Corante has done to date in helping marketers to understand this new landscape and be working with them to fashion packages and messages that provide maximum impact across our blogs, hubs, and partner sites but also our events, seminars, and other info-products.

Let us know what you think...we're interested in your feedback!

- The Corante Team!

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