I've been trying to figure out a workable solution for a couple of months, and have come up with nothing more than some hacks and approximations of what is needed.

Here's a use case:

User "A" (let's call her "Amy") writes a blog post. She wants it to be readable by her professor (let's call her "Betty") and one other student (let's call her "Carmen").

But, she doesn't want the post to be readable by the rest of the class, by students in other classes, nor by the unwashed masses stumbling across a post via Google.

While Writely is cool, it deals with online documents. You can import/export, but the document lives online. That's cool for many uses, but scares some people.

I just found a link to AjaxWrite (via Tangled up in Purple) - it's a javascript based word processor that appears to be compatible with MS Word. You open and save documents on your local hard drive - not in the Internet Cloud.

Basically, it's just a copy of Word that lives in a browser window, meaning you don't have to install it anywhere. Stick your .doc files on a USB thumbdrive (perhaps with a copy of Portable Firefox) and you've got a portable word processor that you can take anywhere, regardless of how a "guest" computer is configured... (actually, if you want portable word processors, there are some options for native applications as well)

From Slashdot comes a mention of the Canadian Music Creators Coalition.

This is one of the coolest things from the world of musicians with respect to IP and copyright. Some of the biggest names in Canadian music just put their feet down to tell the Big Labels not to be evil.

They have a handy website up, with their three principles:

1. Suing Our Fans is Destructive and Hypocritical
2. Digital Locks are Risky and Counterproductive
3. Cultural Policy Should Support Actual Canadian Artists

So, the artists that have the most to gain from protecting the status quo are being very vocal about not wanting to be involved with it.

The colophon, listing the various bits that get twiddled to run my blog, has been woefully out of date. I get periodic emails about the various plugins I use, especially the latest Podpress plugin, so I thought it'd be a good idea to automate the process of updating the list. Enter the bdp_setup plugin by Bryan Palmer at ozpolitics.info.

The colophon is now automatically generated, and guaranteed to stay up to date for as long as I'm using Wordpress to run my blog...

For some of our projects here at the TLC, we need to be able to manage identity information - traditionally, user accounts, groups, roles, etc... We're taking a bit of time to think about a better way of implementing this, and how to use a flexible, distributed identity model.

I've been going through some web searches to find out what others are doing. The "version numbers" are loosely based on Dick Hardt's descriptions (with apologies to him if I've misinterpreted what he was trying to say).

I'm playing with a pre-Cardinal (the next Big Release) build of Flock, and man is it nice! They've replaced the blog editor, and it's the best blog editor I've used. Very nice. The blog manager topbar appears to have disappeared, but I assume it's just being tweaked and will return before the Big Release.

My only gripe is that category selection still sucks - no way to easily find one of my 331 categories in a list sorted by primary key of the category database record. Some sorting/searching/filtering/text-auto-complete interface would be waaay more effective. Oh, and the selected category didn't get applied anyway. I'll go in through the Wordpress web UI to fix it...

My copy of Will's book "Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms" just came in. Looks like it's going to be a pretty good read, providing the perspective of an in-the-trenches teacher, rather than just the geek echochamber I usually expose myself to...

The book is definitely on top of my nonfiction reading list (my fiction reading, on the bus ride commute, is currently another Gregory Benford book I'm deliberately reading out of sequence...)

One of the great comments on my BCEdOnline2006 Unkeynote Debriefing included a link to a wiki page by Chris Corrigan on Open Space Technology - a set of ideas, practices and guidelines for conducting "open space" meetings. Very cool stuff, and it resonated quite well with what we got to do as part of Northern Voice 2006 - specifically the Social Software Salon and the Edublogger Hootenanny. I finally had a chance to go through the linked wiki page, and it's chock full of goodness. I don't think it has to go as far down the kumbaya spectrum as Chris describes - even just the arrangement of the chairs sends a powerful message and sets expectations.

Scott Adams (you know, the Dilbert guy) just posted his version of Occam's Razor. Scott's version goes like this:

The explanation that you believe is correct will always seem simplest to you.

- Scott Adams

Soooo true. It's a better way of rephrasing the old "when you've got a hammer in hand, everything starts to look like nails" thing.

There might be some downtime in the next little while as my blog migrates to a new server. Thanks Sami for the insanely generous offer!

Things should be back soon. If you can read this, you're looking at the shiny new server at Etopian Global Hosting Headquarters.

The performance of my shared server at GoDaddy leaves a LOT to be desired. Pages render out of the database in several seconds, when they should be easily generated in under a second. Their tech support response was to blame images and javascript, when the actual database-based page generation itself is waaaay too slow. Even when pages are rendered OK, they may be spit out somehow triggering a file download rather than content in the browser. (you may have seen a "Download file: index.php" dialog box - I get it all the freaking time)
Comments on the Wordpress support forum pointed to perhaps the server being overwhelmed and reverting to a "safe" download behaviour.