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I wouldn't know what to do with Pageboxes also (as I still don't know of what exactly I am talking about in the main comment in this thread), but my use cases for the general idea were two:

- Online communities. For example, groups of students of some area, groups of pregnant women, groups of people who like tiny houses, groups of people who do geocaching, people who like to save dogs in the streets and give them to adoption, people who like to shoot at birds, people who work with something specific. All these groups probably have groups of email, or Facebook groups, (probably more than one group, maybe various localized groups) where they chat and share interesting links, data and information. Then this data is lost, it isn't searchable by the people who know it exists (specially if they are inside an Excel spreadsheet that was emailed to all the groups' participants), it isn't knowable for people who joined the community later. This people will never know (or will know too later) that that interesting data was there, just behind a pile of emails and posts. There are a lot of examples of data that could be indexed (yes, I'm talking about database indexes) in interesting ways, but I will give none now, and lots of data that could just be organized in an easy way (categories, although I don't like this very much) and made searchable.

For this problem, Trello is a good option, but it is limited, it is centralized, it requires an "owner" of the Trello board to authorize other people, it cannot develop in an organic way, with few people starting to use, then other people joining, and people who don't wanna join never joining. It also cannot index data, just categorize and archive.

- Myself. I don't want a blog, but I have interesting data stored in my computer and my brain I wanna handle to the public over the internet, to whoever be interest in it. I have articles I can't find anywhere else anymore, I have spreadsheet data that should be presented as spreadsheets, I have articles I typed from old magazines, I have videos I don't remember how I got, I also have impressions of books, commentaries about lots of non-mainstream topics, and mainstream topics also, mainly atemporal things, that don't fit well in a blog. I could make a static web page and put all this there, but it seems too difficult for such a low value it will have. I also don't wanna do it because I wanna keep thinking about how would a non-programmer do it. I can't help thinking every people in my situation would: (i) do nothing; or (ii) make a blog, post everything there for two month and abandon the blog. I don't like abandoned blogs.

Pageboxes could do something for this, but I don't know how exactly.

Yes, I was talking about Pagebox. The current version is more like a page builder with some structured data, but we've always dreamed of turning it into a "github of content data", if we can call it that. We are thinking of changing the interface and emphasize the ability to navigate and search, possible something like a mac finder / itunes style of dashboard.

I love the idea of helping build these community databases and make those contents searchable. I see a challange in the fact that this means adding another channel to discuss contents different than the one they already use, but the promise of making those contents easier to reach might make it worth it.

As for the blog problem, I'm in a similar situation. A blog seems to have some lifespan, and there are some raw contents that I would like to have available without worring about a domain name and the design decisions of CMS theme. I have my own particular "delicious", some comments about different articles, a bunch of photos, and many screenshots and mockups from the different projects I've been working on that I would like just to publish without fuzz (Ideally: add all my project folders. Done). It won't be as beautiful as those web portfolios but I don't need that, I want convenience, I don't like abondend blogs either and I have 3 or 4...

Reading these comments gets me really motivated, thanks!

I’ll have a closer look at Pagebox.es

Long time ago, I mused¹ about these kind of things, then worked like mad on devising an implementation. Meanwhile, a side project I’ll take up again, one day.

I love the idea of data blogging.

Thinking more along the lines of what Freebase was doing (before Google smothered it), what Fluidinfo² originally intended to do, and what Silk³ seems to be doing best, right now.

¹ http://rhythmvs.tumblr.com/post/19750973162/hello-world ² http://fluidinfo.com ³ https://www.silk.co

"data blogging" sounds awesome, never thought of those words. I'm pretty much addicted to RSS Feeds, for me there's no better way to access those contents. Being able to translate that experience to structured data would make very happy.

Reading your tumblr post, I think there is useful work to do on the points you mention: Collecting and List Making // Visualising Knowledge // Open Access. We need something simple enough to get the people who already know how to publish posts interested.

Silk is pretty good, and I never heard of Freebase. From wikipedia: "Freebase is a large collaborative knowledge base consisting of metadata composed mainly by its community members. It is an online collection of structured data harvested from many sources". I got to look into this, sounds beautiful.

If you're talking about https://www.pagebox.es I see it as a good competitor to Trello (I always thought of using Trello's API to build a simple idea-tree note-taking app, but their trees have depth limits, yours don't, so I could use yours), but, at the same time, I don't know if your site will be up and online for a long time, so I'm not sure if it is secure to put all my data there.

We've never compared ourselves to Trello, it makes me think that we could make the nestable lists more explicit and promote this note-taking use. As for how long we will last, it's always hard to say, but we won't take down the server, and in any case be assured that before that I'll help everyone to take every byte safely elsewhere, via zip, sql dump, csv, spreadsheet, plain html + css, written in clay tablets.. I mean, I'll be your export module, If you need me to programmatically push it to other service with an API I'll do it, trapping the contents of someone else makes me feel terrible.

Now I'm thinking you could explore more the multi-useness of it. First, you expose an API for accessing the nestable lists from the browser (and other clients, but I like the browser), then various apps can be built on top of it, and they all could be accessed from the main site, such as:

- note taking

- server logs

- manual logs of events (I've seen these in use in lots of small business where some employee must log what happened in its turn)

- personal journal

- mixpanel-like thing

- analytics of any kind

- computer-generated logs of anything that doesn't need a full-fledgeded database and system of its own (I'm thinking specifically of the logs of people who used their password to open a dor we have in our building, that communicates via serial port with a server that stores that info, but very ineffienciently)

- (I'll keep thinking about it)

Look at this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7656442

For a moment, I thought it had been posted as a response for your comment, because it fits well here.