This article got me pondering on how one might start building a distributed “related article” network, but without relying on a centralised silo.

Related articles on the same site is largely a solved problem, but at the moment, to do the similar thing with multiple sites requires a centralised service. Centralisation is bad, as we’ve discussed before, so how could you build a federated network of sites, all referring people between each other in an automated but meaningful way?

My current thinking is to leverage PuSH; Alice lists sites to which they’d like to receive related articles from, these could be individual sites or even a centralised aggregator. Alice’s site then subscribes to the PuSH hub and starts receiving updates, when these updates are received they can be passed through to whatever comparison algorithm you’re using – I’m thinking of adapting the wordpress one for this blog.

Should be fairly straightforward to implement, and would provide a simple way to federate content within a group of individuals.

Anyone working on something like this, or shall I drop this into my todo list?