Ethan Zuckerman wrote up a lengthy post part of which was an extension of a conversation-slash-debate we sort of have been having since I started working on Global Voices.
The thing is, I agree with everything he says, more or less. However I need to clarify something.
(notice how wishy-washy I've been so far? "part of which", "conversation-slash-debate", "sort of", "more or less"...)
First of all, I do not recommend using Drupal for GVO. I know I mentioned it originally as a possibility, but not since. The CMS package I do want to recommend but haven't yet is one I had also mentioned but which seemed to sit even lower in Ethan's esteem so it's name has no been uttered since. I fully intend to make a case for it though.
Now, when GVO was first set up, to maintain Ethan's "building our own house" parallel, they basically rented a small apartment for a couple of friends; "see how it would work out" type of thing. When I was brought in, the mandate was to redecorate... oh and can you convert the kitchen into a high volume cafeteria? Cool!
I don't consider WordPress, the platform GVo is currently built on, "bad software". I consider it a fairly decent bit of code for a basic weblog. Easy to set up, easy to manage (mostly... that UI stinks though), easy to theme (if your needs and demands aren't too high) and, if you know a bit of PHP, easy to add a bit of presentation logic and such stuff.
However, by the time I was done hacking, it was very clear to me, on a conscious level as opposed to just the intuition I had had at the onset, that Global Voices is NOT a weblog; it is an aggregator. Amongst other things.
Here's a little meme that is currently in whisper stages in my circles, and I may be partly to blame for it's nascence: blogs are really aggregators...
So, it's really not a question of using bad software, it's a question of using the right tool for the job. Drupal, again to maintain the metaphor, is a farm. We're not doing that. What we are doing, and this may make Rebecca uneasy, or the opposite, is building an international news/voice collecting and disseminating organization. "A bunch of aggregators with very specific outlets and outputs."
In the end, I think Ethan's intuition is correct, but his wording is problematic. One must use the best and most appropriate tools available to us. Using bad anything is never a good idea. Starting simple and growing is. We're growing, and that apartment is way too small. Time to build a condo complex... or commune... or you know something like that... ;)
As it is public, and Ethan's already playing with a major component of the idea, I can say that moving forward, I hope to use reBlog in a multi-tiered editorial system, giving each regional editor a reBlog of their own to use as their interface to the live site. The details are yet to be draughted out.
I figure I should mention this too: in the last 6 months, I have not worked on a single "weblog": it's all been various types of aggregators. Every single weblog client has asked for features that were aggregation/metablogging/content-republishing in nature, some explicitly, some unconsciously. I have been in regular contact with Michal, 1/2 of the reBlog dev team of which I am hoping to make myself 1/3 of. I am also now involved, in various ways, in a flat-out online aggregator, an investment fund focused on aggregation and a desktop aggregator. You know what the coolest thing I've learnt is? I'M an aggregator. And so are you!
