user storys
Jain loves her cat Pixie and wants to create a blog with photos and life stories of her cat. All her friends are creating Tumblr accounts but her friend told her about Open Media Network and that she could reach a wider audience. She created a Wordpress site instead. To make her blog more interesting and dynamic she adds some #OMN side bars from catlovers.net instance using the tags “black and white” “cat” and "fun” so that she can receive new pictures and headlines from other similar websites everyday. Her feed is added back to the catlovers.net instance and thus linked from up to 100 cat sites each time she posted a new story.
Libby is a writer and journalist who in the past was published in major newspapers. She writes opinion pieces based on current news events.
She keeps her hand in by writing pieces for her blog. She then posts her blog on facebook. Some of her friends share her pieces. Her blog reaches between twenty to a hundred people, mainly her friends.
Libby knows one of the developers of the Open Media Network. He adds her feed from her blog to the OMN instance so that when she publishes a new piece the sidebars of all the blogs that are interested in her work are alerted. All someone has to do is click on the link and they will be taken to her site so they can read the new blog post. At the same time her blog will be copied and stored on OMN servers, or instances, so that a backup is always available.
As time goes on more people sees Libbys blog on the sidebar on their blogs. Her viewing figures double over a couple of months. So she decides to reciprocate and adds a sidebar to her blog and links to some other blogs she likes.
She is now a part of the OMN. A number of prominent sites feature her blog and the number of people looking at her blog increase dramatically and keeps growing as the network expands.
Thanks JH
Lucy has an old inactive blog about horses. She now has a Facebook page that she uses for this. Less people are seeing her photos/posts than used to look at her blog. She is annoyed by the nagging adverts asking her to pay for people to see her posts.
Lucy sees an advert on blogging one evening after her art class. Signing up she learns about the Open Media Network. She shows the tutor her old blog and her Facebook page. The tutor encourages her to develop her blog by adding more photographs and written material and encouraging her to link her site to other sites with similar interests. The class tutor gets the students to help each other add a sidebar to their sites using OMN tools. She learns that the side bar is called a “blog role". She soon has a list of local horsey sites and blogs linking off a sidebar. From this class she finds a group of new proto-bloggers to help each other out, they have regular social meetings in her kitchen. Some of them have a lot of internet and IT skills and others are more interested in the content of the blogs. After a few months they setup a local OMN instance linking all there blogs together.
A vibrant local online and face to face community starts to emerge and Lucy’s blog gets more and more interest. She hardly looks at Facebook these days.
Thanks John Hoggett
Jim is a librarian who has always been interested in counter culture. He has spent the last 10 years collecting all the leaflets and pamphlet he can find on road protesting, climate change, GMO's ect. One day he goes to his favorite activist news site and finds it offline. Asking around he find that the has been a problem with the server and nobody knows how to reboot it as the volunteer sys admin left 9 months ago. Because of server encryption the is no working backup and the only redundant files are on an encrypted harddrive that nobody remembers the password for. All the work and connections of hundreds of people have been lost as well as the archive of media and articles going back 10 years. He had been to a public meeting about the OMN a few months ago and had been interested in how it could be used to create DIY backups of articles flowing through it. Setting up a OMN instance is still complex so he has to get some activist geek friends to help, after a few days its up and running and actively curating a data base of all articles flowing through the network with the tags he choices. In this if any site goes down he, like anyone, can have the full text backup. As text is small he can hold millions of articles on a cheap server and manages to set-up himself a RSS reading app to copy this taged flow to his local computer just in case he has server issues like his now defunct favorite activist website. From this experience he becomes an expert on open data flows.
Jasper is a fashernista geek looking to make a iphone app, he see news as a growth area, as a programmer he has no knowledge or skill producing news content so he is looking for existing sources he can find and use. Being a talent programmer he quickly knocks together a “cover flow” interface with a tag highlighting linking structure. He fills his app with content from a mainstream OMN aggregater noid and highlights the tags in the text to give a interface on this data flow. As his app is tool which data freely flows through he can sell it for $2.99 on the apple store. After a number of good reviews he sells 100,000 installs which allows him to give up his day job in the local council tax office.
Flipo has a bus in East London converted into a restaurant, he currently has a Facebook page but this only reaches a tiny number of people (3%) who like it. He is a member of London Hackspace were he goes to a workshop on booting up the OMN. Inspired by this he decides to set-up a (OMN) aggregating site covering events and food in East London, he gets a friend to do this for him using drupal and the OMN plug-ins. After spending an evening adding RSS feeds of all the restaurants and venues he can find. The next morning he has a website linking to content that regularly updates. He features his own content on this.
Jacen has a family history website that she updates regularly. The is a group of history web sites that have setup a OMN instance to push out there content to a wider audience, Janice adds her RSS feed to this instance and the hits on her site jump immediately each time she publishes new content. She gets help to add a sidebar section on her site with a OMN flow based on the tags “family history” and “research” with this in place she become a member of the OMN and her site becomes more visible to people. She finds her self working with a group of interesting people.
Jeff has a band, he used to get contacts for gigs on myspace and more recently on facebook, but this had been drying up. He has a friend who is setting up a OMN instance in Manchester linking to the music seen. Jeff helps them out by becoming a volunteer tag moderator of the data flows, from the inside knowledge of these rich data flows he rebuilds personal connections that help to re-spark his music.