Outreach Mission

“Outreach” is not just software, it is a mission.

A mission to make the internet help us understand ourselves better. A mission to publish knowledge as well as information. A mission to evolve. A mission to share and enjoy.

As the name suggests, outreach is you, the blog author, reaching out from your publication to the global internet, in your own way. You already do it using links. Outreach the mission simply asks you to make your outward connections using meaningful tags rather than (or as well as) links, something that requires only time, effort, thought and vision. Blog authors already have all these things. No software is needed.

Outreach the plug-in (currently for WordPress) makes your blog understand the new outreach tags and gives you ready-made links in your posts and comments for free. I intend to evolve the Outreach plug-in so that, one day, blogging with comprehensive outreach will be as simple and quick as blogging without it is today. Outreach the mission, if people are to both share and enjoy, needs the support of excellent software. I will provide that.

As both the mission and plug-in are brand new, only my blog has either. Please browse some of my older entries to see the outreach tagging in action. If you want to see the actual outreach tags, view the page source and search for “<is:”. I am applying them to my own archives in chronological order and to all new posts. I am being very careful not to go too far as both the mission and plug-in are still on design probation. This page also, obviously, contains outreach tags.

This page will evolve into a complete guide to Outreach. I have more ideas than I can possibly write down yet.

Outreach Help

I want my publication to be read and understood by as many people as possible. I want to help people find background and detailed information on any unfamiliar subject I am discussing. To do this, I provide links for some of the things, products, people, places, concepts and words that I use, something I call “outreach”.

For example, if I am discussing quantum mechanics I might mention such people as Erwin Schröedinger and Werner Heisenberg, products such as CERN in places like Switzerland, concepts such as the uncertainty principle and special relativity and words like quantum and electrodynamics.

If you the reader, like I the author, have no clue what any of those things mean, you may click the links for further information on the subject from the sources of information I normally use, such as WikiPedia, Google and the broader internet.

If, on the other hand, you find the links annoying you may switch them off using the outreach control which appears on every page with outreach. Use the control panel to set the level of outreach you wish to see from the options available. Click “none” to remove all the outreach links and be left with the bare text.

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3 Comments

  1. Daniel Schierbeck says:

    The @cite attribute is different from the one in XHTML – have you considered using an URI instead?

    February 24, 2006, 4:41 pm

  2. Libertus says:

    Daniel! Welcome! You are my first, ever commenter on the Outreach Mission. I shall remember you forever! And you express yourself with style. How delightful.

    I gave a lot of thought to cite, knowing there was an existing use in XHTML. In fact, I studied the existing use quite extensively before deciding to adopt it. As with XHTML, my cite attribute expresses a citation of some kind, specific to the tag being used.

    With all my tags, the cite attribute should be omitted if the tagged text is also the citation. Citations are not URIs, except for <is:uri>. If a URI reference is needed when using the other tags, it is specified by the from attribute.

    February 24, 2006, 6:30 pm

  3. Libertus says:

    I’ve been thinking for a while about how to extend the reach my Outreach search links to the websites they eventually link. At the moment, the HTTP referer is Google search, not here. Mental note: Add something like -site:www.libertini.net/libertus as a search term. That will hopefully appear in their incoming weblogs and have a beneficial effect on the search – it won’t link back!

    Update
    I’ve settled on “-site:$post_permalink_without_scheme”, which Google will hopefully NOOP internally but pass on in its referral query string, to be picked up by the link endpoint. Access log analysis programs may list the term but are unlikely to understand its meaning. It’s subtle but it is also important. The link endpoint should know that the incoming search phrase was not typed into Google ad hoc.

    June 2, 2006, 8:59 pm

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