An ancient edublog
Do ya like the piccie :) Here’s the article! And for a limited time it looks like I’m on their Higher Ed Homepage.
“A LOT of people spend a lot more than $US3000 a year on their hobbies,” James Farmer says, laughing.
His hobby may be better described as a quasi-religious quest: he preaches a gospel of interactive learning.
At his web portal, edublogs.org, teachers and students can set up free blogs using WordPress, an open-source tool…. [read the rest]
I’ve put this in subverted links but I can’t help myself wanting to post it now too… from the Guardian:
The BBC today unveiled radical plans to rebuild its website around user-generated content, including blogs and home videos, with the aim of creating a public service version of MySpace.com
Which sounds great, hell yeh says I, but something concerns me:
Mr Highfield’s presentation, Beyond Broadcast, outlined a three-pronged approach to refocus all future BBC digital output and services around three concepts – “share”, “find” and “play”.
He said the philosophy of “share” would be at the heart of what he dubbed bbc.co.uk 2.0.
Mr Highfield said the share concept would allow users to “create your own space and to build bbc.co.uk around you”, encouraging them to launch their own blogs and post home videos on the site.
Specifically it’s that this is like a nasty echo of the kind of hopelessly utopian ideals that Derek Powazek describes so well … I mean, doesn’t it just feel like optimistic, podcast-esque, web-bubblespeak? Aren’t we over the kind of ‘build your own space’, ‘share with other users’, ‘personal experience’ thing… I just wonder how much users / visitors will actually get out of this?
Heck, I could be totally wrong, they could be entirely on the button here and I certainly reckon that this is absolutely the right conversation to be having, but ‘share, find and play’ is to me too far removed from reality.
Why would you ‘share’? What would you want to ‘find’? And why would you bother to ‘play’?
Update: Marshall Kirkpatrick knows where to look for press releases :)
… time to start behaving like a responsible adult ;)
Being the utter novice that I am when it comes to things of php and alike I seem to find myself all too frequently searching for code in the – admittably rather straightforward – php backends of WordPress, bbPress and, of late, Pligg.
‘Owever, naturally Windows search doesn’t help here so after a rather displeasing experience with Google Desktop Search I installed Copernic yesterday but it doesn’t find anything either :(
So, does anyone know of a desktop search application that will crawl all the php files I have and let me search for terms like “just another” and actually find them? I reckon this would be the single most effective hacking tool I could have at the mo so any help would be v. much appreciated!
Dave Winer reports that TV Guide has ‘launched a blogging community‘ and it’s a pretty interesting endeavour to be sure:
Over 65 entertainment blogs are now live on the site, featuring expert reporting and commentary from writers and editors from both TV Guide magazine and TVguide.com. Each blog allows TVGuide.com users to post comments and interact with the site’s critics. In addition, every user can create his or her own blog about entertainment using TVGuide.com’s simple blogging tools. [emphasis me]
Well, from a cursory look I reckon they’re about half way there. The blogs look pretty well written and seem to be engaging a fair few readers, although there are some strange linking behaviours taking place as well, checkout this post where every link is to a search of the term on the tvonline.com dbase… bizarre.
But while it is pretty exciting that they’re offering readers blog spaces too, this is where they also fall in a fairly crumpled heap I’m afraid.
First, you get a blog by default when you sign up (there’s nothing telling you that this is what you’re getting, it just appears there), then you have no control whatsoever over templating – in fact you have no control over anything – even your previous posts as far as I can find. Add to that a pretty basic posting systems, no rich media options, an afterthought of a poll creator and a working environment that ‘usability test me, please!’ – it’s a pretty painful experience.
However, there are a couple of redeeming features – the full integration of RSS across the site might not make for a great deal of use for tvonline reader but at least it’s there and it won’t do them any harm in search terms if it’s linked up to a ping service. Also, while clunky, there’s a nicely conceptualised email subscription service to keep up to date with latest updates on writers & users blogs – although there’s a good debate to be had about the value of email as opposed to or alongside a web based aggregation strategy built into the site.
And heck, at least they’re giving it a shot… a bit of a glorified forum / blogs in 2002 shot… but it’s great to see this sort of thing being trialled and it’ll be fascinating to see how it does / doesn’t work and develops over the next year or so.
There are a *lot* of cool things happening behind the scenes at edublogs.org at the moment and all will be revealed soon, but in the meantime here’s a taster – fully integrated forums.
All you have to do is pop in your edublogs.org username and password and you’ll be in (it shares the users database). w00t!