I mentioned before that this site will be a departure in some ways from the original idea of Understudy. Here's the plan as it currently stands.

I've been studying online communities in my time here at Cornell and I've been particularly impressed with the Scoop software platform, on which a lot of such communities run. I'm not using this software for reasons that will become apparent presently. But in laying out my notion, let me describe what Scoop does well.

It's basically a blog aggregation tool for a given online community. It puts all the blogs in a community into a common feed that shows up on the site's homepage. In doing so, it lumps well-known and unestablished writers together into a feed which is read by the whole community, not to mention occasional posters with prolific ones. Because of this, everyone in a community gets an audience, and people who normally wouldn't find each other talk.

It also means that those occasional or poorly connected bloggers, whose lonely sites would normally never generate an audience, are able to contribute in valuable ways to the larger discussion. Since their posts are part of a larger community feed, it doesn't matter if these people only post once a year--they'll still be read when they do. And if their occasional postings are well-thought out, they make a dent, rather than falling into a low-traffic abyss. In terms of how Scoop aggregates the value of individual contributions, it's almost like Wikipedia, in that the community benefits from everyone's pro-social work, big or small, one-off or frequent. And new bloggers get lots more encouragement, since in posting to a Scoop site, they immediately have access to an audience.

I'd like to do something similar for the community that's looking at journalism and new media. But there are already a number of active bloggers out there on these subjects, and there's no reason for them to uproot and move to some common Scoop site. Instead, the way I'm setting up this site, people should be able to simply syndicate their posts here—they need not do anything more than post to their home blog, and it will still show up on Unevenly Distributed, with a permalink back to the original post. At the same time, new bloggers or people who'd rather not mess installing Wordpress, MT or the like can host their blogs on this site if they chose. I'm hoping that this arrangement has the potential to grow the community—new bloggers would get featured in the feeds along with more established ones, thus encouraging participation; existing bloggers who might be outside of the existing "Carnival of Journalism," say, could sign themselves up; and ultimately the site might serve as a hub that drives traffic and new readers to existing blogs.

But if that's the plan, why not just leave it at an RSS feed that aggregates different blogs? Well, a feed isn't a very participatory way of doing things. When I started talking with folks, they pointed me in the direction of social software platforms like Ning and PHPizabi, which aggregate blog content, but also let people communicate in a rich variety of ways, sharing media and messaging one another in a manner that goes beyond a simple blog carnival. These are platforms that basically add social networking tools to "old fashioned" carnival blogging. And that's what I'd like here.

But I'd like to do it in a way that, as I said, doesn't force established bloggers to uproot and move to a new site. And unfortunately, the tools I just mentioned require people to do that. It'd be nice to give people the option to host their blog locally, but forcing established writers onto a new platform would be counterproductive and risky.

So, in summary, here are the requirements:

(1) Provide blog aggregation, with social networking tools built in.

(2) Allow bloggers anywhere to syndicate all or some of their content to the site, without moving their hosting arrangement, while still giving them access to the social networking tools that the site provides.

(3) Simultaneously allow new bloggers, or ones who'd like to move to host their blogs on the site.

(4) Let people use their social network login to post comments to blogs anywhere within this confederation of blogs.

The platform I've settled on to do this is BuddyPress, which is a variant of the blog hosting software WordPress Mu. It effectively turns the WordPress MU installation into a social networking site. Since WordPress is at the heart of it, though, it should be able to handle posts syndicated from other sites—as this functionality has been available for some time through plugins like FeedWordPress and software/plugin hybrids like ReBlog.

I'm sure it'll require a lot of tinkering to get it to work properly. In the meantime, if you have suggestions or think I've overlooked something, please let me know. I'm at a busy point in my life right now, so this will take me awhile to complete. But bear with me and please keep the feedback coming. I'll take everything I can to heart while trying to stave off the sort of feature-creep that would keep the site from launching indefinitely.

For those of you who subscribe to the RSS roundup, I apologize that it broke briefly, from last night into this morning. I tried upgrading my server to PHP 5 and the software wouldn't have it. I've since rolled back to PHP 4 and everything is working nicely again. If your feed reader happened to tell you that the feed was corrupt, don't worry, it hasn't been taken down and is now running smoothly again.

One holdover from the original Understudy page that will continue to function during the reconstruction of this site (and beyond) is the roundup feed--an RSS feed that aggregates posts about journalism and new media from around 30 blogs.

Subscribing is as simple as clicking here. I update it once or twice a day and it usually delivers in the neighborhood of 15 posts daily.

Enjoy! Also, if your favorite blog isn't included, please let me know and I'll pick it up.

My original intent was for my site to be a hub for research blogging about journalism and new media. But I quickly found that the much of the most active (and interesting) blogging and introspection going on around the subject was coming from among journalists.

And I realized quickly that discussion about this topic should include a much larger crowd—not just people studying journalism, but people doing it, and people challenging it. That would be the way to move forward.

The original title, though appropriate for a research blog site, was not nearly so fitting for the wider community I hope to cater to. I thought about what I would call this place for awhile (particularly when it came time to register a new domain name), and came up empty. Until I saw a post on Steve Yelvington's site that reminded me of a great quote from William Gibson:

The future is already here—it's just unevenly distributed.

And with that, I hit upon the new site name, "Unevenly Distributed," which both plays on the media term, "distribution"—a concept that's very much in flux right now—and invites users to consider the future, which is, after all the purpose of the site.

Anyhow, I hope it works for people aside from just me.

Hello, and welcome to the development blog for Unevenly Distributed, the online community site formerly known as Understudy.

The site is currently under construction, but you can check here for status updates and news about its impending launch.

Unevenly Distributed is intended to host a community of people interested in the intersections between journalism, new media, and digital culture. It's not a news site, but a site about the news, and how journalism is impacting, and being transformed by—sometimes even merging with—other forms of media.

For a more complete description of the site's evolution, you can look at the original Understudy site (now dormant) and check back here for updates. The blueprint for this site is not yet complete—it's already evolved since the original site was mothballed.

That a way of saying, if you have any suggestions, please chime in!