A Federated Approach to Crossblogging through Contracts

Blogs are good at authoring and publishing. However, they fall short as communication platforms. By contrast, social platforms such as Face book, are good at creating communities, though the price is a lost in autonomy and control over your own data. This paper advocates for a federated approach for blogs where bloggers freely decide to hand over some rights to other bloggers so that posts/comments/track backs can flow along the "blog union". Bloggers keep full control over their blogs but permit content from other blogs to be published. "Blog unions" are governed through contracts. This work describes both a contract life cycle and an RDF-based contract specification using event-condition-action rules. The approach is borne out by Blog Union, an extension for Blojsom that permits a blog to set contracts to other union-aware blogs.