Case studies of Decentralist solutions can be posted and discussed here.

Some of the various technologies that can be applied to a Decentralized approach will be described and discussed here.

The nature of a decentralized system can lead to fragmentation - many different types of tools, each with its own pecularities. This can lead to a steep learning curve for users of the decentralized system.

Decentralized systems are generally more reliable than single, monolithic Centralized systems. If one part of a Decentralized system becomes unavailable for some reason, the rest of the system is able to function without it.

Stephen Downes just posted 2 links that might be useful.

1. Latest issue of JIME. Topic is "The Educational Semantic Web". This is important because it may form a common way of describing resources in a more distributed way. APOLLO will need to tie into these concepts when they become available.

2. An article called "Improving Metadata Quality: Augmentation and Recombination" that talks about metadata as a collection of statements about a resource, and the possibility of managing metadata at the statement level. Sound familiar? APOLLO basically does this now.

A bunch of us here in the Learning Commons were poised above our keyboards at precisely noon today - when the available Saddledome seats were released to ticketmaster.ca

Well, the rabid Flames fans basically brought the Ticketmaster server to its knees - search results were displaying an estimate of 15 minutes to find anything, and all tickets were sold out before search results were displayed.

I'm guessing all seats, for both games #3 and #4, were sold out in under 10 minutes. To those lucky enough to sneak through the Ticketmaster screen.

This weblog started out a couple of years ago (first post retained from that era was July 2002 ) as a personal project, run under a beta of Blosxom, and published to my .Mac account. Most of the "early" posts from this era have been dropped, but I kept the ones relating to the projects I was/am working on.

Since then, it evolved to be hosted as a MovableType weblog, and ran on that software for over a year. It was switched back to Blosxom 2.0 in May 2004, and switched once more in September 2004 - this time to Wordpress (which is running the weblog now).

I was trying to figure out why Alan's Feed2JS tool wasn't displaying dates for my weblog feed. Alan pointed out that it was an RSS 0.91 feed, so it didn't have dates. Duh.

After an email to the Blosxom group, and some googling, I've got an RSS 1.0 feed available. Turns out I needed an additional plugin to give the minimal Blosxom script some extra brains, and then some flavour files to tell it how to render the feed.

I've just installed Alan Levine's handy Feed2JS tool, which takes any RSS feed and spits out a couple of lines of HTML/Javascript for embedding it on any web page. Very handy stuff.

It's available here if anyone on campus needs it. I'm using it to aggregate the active Learning Commons weblogs onto a single page here.

Thanks, Alan!

UPDATE: (2004/08/04) I have noticed that the Feed2js deployed on commons is being pretty heavily abused. It's being used by German dating sites, and many many other questionable (and certainly non-academic) uses. The number of requests on our server for the single feed2js.php file is an order of magnitude greater than the next-most-requested file. I'm temporarily disabling Feed2js for a while.

Just came across this comparison of open source licenses from OpenFoundry.org.

Almost plain english, and provides a nice at-a-glance table of key features and restrictions of the various licenses. They compare the 10 most popular licenses, as used by projects on SourceForge.net

This should be a useful companion to the listing of actual OSI-Approved licenses from the Open Source Intiative.

I was thinking a bit over the weekend about modifying Jay Allen's awesome MT-Blacklist plugin to work with Blosxom. I just did some googling, and searching of the Yahoo Group for Blosxom, and came up with Doug Alcorn's BlogSpam.

It's based on the MT-Blacklist plugin, and uses the same blacklist.txt file. It even merges in email notification of new writebacks, making my own wbnotify_nosendmail hack unnecessary and redundant.

If you're thinking of using Blosxom as a weblog in a public space, do yourself a favour and grab BlogSpam. It replaces the default writeback plugin, and only requires some minor customization. (I added some additional stuff to quote the name in the sender's email address, and to use a specified mailserver rather than localhost - I'll probably do some other minor modification to tweak the output message as well).

The Library of Congress just released this report, which discusses rights expression languages (the stuff that drives usable DRM).

Here's a link to the PDF. Haven't had a chance to read it yet, but it might come in handy.