bodega: partners, aggregating audiences and YOU

I did a quick screencast today showing what "partners" are in Bodega and how they work. It's one of the many ways that Bodega is a little bit different from other similar systems and as such a screencast can't hurt to help people understand how it works. I will cover other aspects of Bodega in future, so feedback on what would make these videos more useful to you is welcome.

A primary concept with Bodega is that of audience aggregation. Many of us have audiences, but few of us have big audiences, and even fewer have huge audiences. Unfortunately, the economics of selling content only works with larger audiences and even for those who aren't selling stuff it's often more of an incentive when your audience is larger.

Since Bodega can host all kinds of content and then show only selections of that content, it naturally allows for content aggregation. To understand why imagine that there are three solitaire card games which have configurable backgrounds, card deck graphics and game rules. Each of them uses similar image files to decorate the cards shown on screen, but each of them uses a different file format to describe how the games work. Now imagine that all three of these projects integrate Bodega into their game to allow people to get new card decks, backgrounds and game rules.

In Bodega, people could happily publish backgrounds and card decks. The backgrounds might just be regular ol' wallpapers, or they might be a specific type of image for board game "mats". Other people could publish game rules that are specific to one of the three card games. While the backgrounds and card decks would have a common tag noting what they were, these game rules would be tagged with the applicable game.

A card game developer would then create a store in Bodega that shows all backgrounds, all card decks .. but only the game rules for their game. Each of these could be put into a separate channel in their store so when the person playing Mystery Science Solitaire 3k presses the "Download card decks.." button they see just card decks and not backgrounds or game rules.

Everyone is happy .. but something interesting has happened in the process. Instead of trying to motivate an artist to make card decks for your special card game, they just have to be motivated to make a card deck for any of the card games. Perhaps they'll be more motivated if they know that their work will show up in multiple applications and therefore get in front of more people. Probably, right?

In such a case, the artist doesn't even need to know about Mystery Science Solitaire 3k to make it better, so the app developer also wins.

Now .. forget about card games for a moment and think about entire Linux distributions. Or independent musicians and authors. Or small device makers. Yeah.

Together we can aggregate audiences and increase the sustainability of each of our interests in the process. The key word is together.

We're going to be writing a "integrating a Bodega store into your system" HOWTO and then I'll be making it my mission for Q1 2014 to get as many projects, people and companies doing exactly that. Between now and then, I'm looking for early adopters that we can work more closely with to refine that HOWTO.

If you are involved with a project that you think Bodega integration would be perfect for, please contact me by email at aseigo at kde.org. Your project can be web based, focused on the traditional desktop or mobile; it can be a single application or a bigger system. All I ask is that it has had a public release and has some user base already, even if small.