I just finished presenting a session with Jim Groom called “More than just a blog” where we where showing some things we’ve done with WordPress and Drupal that might be a little outside the box for a pure blogging platform. Jim’s done some really amazing and cool things with WPMU at MWU.
The session was a total blast for me. It evolved into a pretty lively discussion that wandered around a very wide range of topics - I hope it wasn’t too scattered.
I’m sitting in the kitchen here at Casa del Lamb, and we’re bashing around some ideas for mashups and cool ways to display data for MooseCamp and Northern Voice. We just had (what I think is) a really cool idea. What if we could take the OPML file from the planet.northernvoice.ca aggregator (which contains a reference to many/most of the blogs representing the people attending the conference), and run some analysis on that to figure out what the relationships and subgroups are within the larger group of Northern Voice Attendees.
Still obsessing about warmer/sandier places. And I did not take these photos - they are photos I’ve seen in my various Flickr feeds. All I did was hit the “Fave” button on them (someone complemented me on the great whale photos I’ve been taking - that won’t happen until next month…)
Anyway, she’s coordinating an online seminar through SCoPE titled “Blogging to enhance learning experiences” - it’s a moodle community with a fair amount of activity (and many familiar faces). It runs from February 12-25, so it’s already under way.
Definitely worth checking out. I’ll be mostly lurking, but will try to participate in the buildup to Northern Voice (our session is on the 24th)
Naturally, the first thing I’d try to do with Pipes is to mock up something like Eduglu - taking feeds associated with a group of individuals and merging them into one place. The concept, from an educational standpoint, would theoretically make it feasible for students and/or teachers to monitor relevant online activities for an entire class, without having to hunt out each person’s various feeds.
It’s not quite there yet, though. Currently, the concept of Filters is rather borked in Pipes. If you’re dealing with a homogeneous set of feeds in a Fetch, it works fine, but as you add different kinds of feeds, the parameters for filtering go all wonky (is it filtering based on Category? dc:topic? Title? Description? Something else?)
Maybe Eduglu is just a set of metapipes? LifeHacker gives a thorough howto for creating a personal überfeed from all of your separate feeds, complete with sorting and filtering.
I just got off the line with Cole, Alan and Brad - the ETS edtech crüe at PSU, where we recorded an episode of ETSTalk. I babbled for a bit about what I do here (and it was likely as clear to them as to me :-) ), then we talked a bit about innovations and the need to build concrete stepping stones to help people grok new stuff. I mentioned some of the projects I’m working on with faculty and off-campus folks, and we talked about reasons behind blogging (with me narcissistically remembering the story of how I started blogging, because of course everyone is so interested in that. rivetting stuff…)
I tried. I really did. I wanted to give Google Reader a full week to see how well it works as a full-time feed aggregator.
I couldn’t do it.
My morning check-in took 5 times longer than normal this morning. Google Reader seems like it would be nice for a small set of feeds, but it becomes unwieldy on my subscriptions. Endless scrolling, lots of clicking on folders, and waiting for items to be added to the bottom of the page, with no indication of how far you’ve come through the items in a folder (the scroll bar eventually becomes pegged at the bottom, even if there are 300 items left to read). And GR has no concept of a photo feed, so they’re all displayed inline rather than in a grid, making it take an order of magnitude longer to go through my Flickr feeds. Frustrating.
I had an idea on the bus coming into work this morning. It didn’t have caffeine applied yet, so it’s either less or more coherent than normal.
I was wondering how much of the patent brouhaha over the last couple of years (at least it seems like it’s been louder, or at least a bigger issue, over the last couple of years) is a result of companies filing patents to protect themselves from patent infringement lawsuits from other companies.
So, Steve entered the blogosphere today (as pointed out earlier by Cole and Bill) with an amazing surgical strike against DRM. It appears as though the Fruit Company only grudgingly went along with the bare minimum DRM in order to placate the music cartel into playing with them online.
In the very logical, concise statement, Steve lays his cards on the table. He’s all in. DRM is lame, and is nothing more than a tool for struggling monopolies to attempt to maintain the status quo in a changing marketplace (my words, not his. I’m paraphrasing).
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