Marg’s doing Freire Friday… the more PF the better IMO… wakes us up a bit from out these apathetical mindless noughties!

Via Donncha this is a fantastic button maker!

Coupla interesting posts from Graham Attwell at the Wales-Wide Web :o) of late on the subject of eportfolios and that unmanaging learning management systems thing.

Via Msr Dog comes FeedWordPress…

“FeedWordPress is an Atom/RSS aggregator for WordPress. It syndicates content from newsfeeds that you select into your WordPress blog; if you syndicate several newsfeeds then you can WordPress’s posts database and templating engine as the back-end of an aggregation (”planet”) website.”

I wonder how this compares to Robert’s WordPress aggregator… there must be something aggregatory in the air at the moment!

Check it out, one of the speakers at Blogtalk Downunder with be Queensland Senator Andrew Bartlett, who keeps the imaginatively titled ;o) blog Senator Andrew Bartlett.

Seriously though we’re really looking forward to this and I think that what Sen Bartlett is doing is a wonderful, wonderful way of opening up politics… which he discusses more here in Politics & the Power of Blogs – Potent or Pissweak?

“Occasionally I read something – usually on a blog – about the power of the blogosphere and its revolutionary implications for politics. Unfortunately, my own experience when I say “I have a blog” to somebody – even politically engaged people – is that 95% of them will reply “what’s a blog?”…”

Interesting, D’Arcy points to Carl Berger blogging at the Apple Digital Campus Exchange Leadership Institute Blog (phew).

Particularly interesting as they’re using WordPress and even more so in that they seem to be using it in the most bizarre form ever… they call it a ‘community blog’.

Sorry Stephen but I don’t see this lasting beyond a few first posts, some follow-ups, one person doing most of the running and then it falling by the wayside… so “he will now experience first-hand what we have been talking about all along, which could only mean good things” isn’t what I think’ll happen… wrong environment & tools for job = not so good :o(

What they really should be doing, of course, is running a real community application like Drupal or even better thinking a little about centered communication and employing WPMU and maybe WP Aggregator. Then they might get it a little more.

In a way I reckon that no blogging is a lot better than badly executed blogging (and I know what I’m talking about when it comes to badly executing ;o)

Oh, and has anyone read the utterly horrific terms of use on this blog. Around 3,500 word long (8 pages copied into Word)… Apple are actually a bit evil aren’t they:

“…Stay on topic. The Site is here to help Educators to exchange ideas for more effective teaching and the use of Apple products and technologies to achieve that goal. Unless otherwise noted, don’t add Submissions about other topics, including things like:
• That Apple rumour you saw on another website.
• Discussions of Apple policies or procedures that don’t have a bearing on the Site’s appropriate subject matter.
• Speculations/rumours about unannounced products….”

My advice would be that they first figure out what a blog is and how to use it and then take their enormous BigCo ‘terms and conditions’ arse and haul it right back to graphic design, please… what’s with the URL to this site as well: http://edmarketing.apple.com/adcinstitute/

Calm now, back to holiday…

Derek Powazek knows exactly what he’s talking about. Blogging is not journalism and vica verca and hurrah… basically :o)

Am on holiday this week with the girls, spent yesterday picking up gumnuts and stuff at the tan (for new Blogtalk design… expect studio photography :O)

In the meantime though I think we should have the first ever IncSub competition! I may have spent hours and hours putting together the new site but graphic designer I am not and consequently the banner looks like, um, this:

So here’s the challenge, using the real estate above (we can change the background colour too if you want (web colours only though please) and incorporating the online learning and development side of things can you come up with a new logo / icon for IncSub?

I’d like it to reflect (somehow) the principles behind incorporated subversion (more on that here), our focus on learning & development online and, um, look as snazzy as Lee LeFever’s (you don’t know how much I envy his icon & cards :o)

As a prize I’m happy to offer 3 months of free hosting through an IncSub 1 plan, credit on the homepage and some serious good karma!

Please send through all entries to james [at] incsub (dot) org. I’ll keep it open for 7 days, closing at 12PM AET on Monday April 11th.

Is it me or has the Guardian not just gone bloggy in the sense of having blogs but has also started linking in overviews to the different sections of the paper? I like it :o)

Scripting News is 8. It’s been a feature on my RSS reader since I started this blogging and RSS caper and, I look forward to it too. I think it’s all the soap opera stuff :o)

Keep on rollin’ Dave (without whom, incidentally, I might not have gone further than the first month of blogging!)