Robert French has made the WordPress Aggregator blog available for download:

“I’ve tested it a couple of times and it ‘should’ work for either a full install – or just incorporating it into an existing blog.

Give it a try if you get a chance. Feedback / corrections / ideas — all appreciated.”

Excellent :o) Will do!

D’Arcy is a misery guts :o)

After having a chat with Steve Brooks of edugadget the other day I thought it might be rather a good idea to set up a hub for edublogs.

So. me being me and not one to hang around too long I ran off and bought edublogs.org (just a Drupal site sitting there at the mo, nothing more) and did some scribbling about what I would like it to be like.

Well, first up it’ll be a great home for the edublog awards 2.0 in November but more importantly I think we, as a community, need something that’s as good as Sarah’s 2002 edublogs list at alterego.

I know there have been various attempts at networks and sites along this line, though, such as PhDWeblogs and the Educational Bloggers Network but what I want is a kinda portal site which can guide people to good edublogs and also do the Will thing of featuring new and ‘non top 20’ blogs prominently.

So, the idea I had in mind goes a bit like this.

-4 key areas: elearning / K12 / Higher ed / TESOL

-Each area has on the front page a ‘top 5’ (I’ll get onto this) and a featured site (which can’t be in the top 20 or something like that) they have title (and tag line) and image.

-Each area page features a complete list of blogs based upon votes (this is how we get the top 5 ‘+’ and ‘-‘ votes for each blog… or maybe 1-10?) with a full description.

-People enter blogs / info through a simple form and buttons along the lines of ‘support this blog at edublogs.org’ are set out.

Am looking at the CMSs on offer though (especially Drupal) and it feels like this kind of system almost falls in the ‘too hard’ basket :(

So do you think this would be worthwhile? Do you reckon the format described above would moreorless do the job (and actually ‘work)? And most importantly, any idea which app / what scripts might be able to work this for me?

Naturally it’d have a ‘brought to you by IncSub’ thing attached :o) If anyone’s interested in collaborating on this one then it could have a ‘supported by [Insert your blog or company here]’ big ol’ sticker at the top too!

Matt responds to the WordPress spam issues in what, IMO, is a bloody great post.

I think WP is a fantastic system and I have the utmost respect for Matt and the community.

Now we’ve finally got DSL at home (using dial-up does keep you honest mind!) I’m thinking about running a P2P app. Which would you recommend?

Kazaa, Shareaza, any of these?

Advice much appreciated!

[Update: Thanks to Tim for this list ‘o links:

* Filesharing FAQ

* therecordingindustriy.com

* SLYCK

* The Freenet Project (a little bit off topic but an interesting project)]

I’m asking for feedback / thoughts about donating 5% of all my IncSub revenues to open source projects.

(this post isn’t a joke btw :o)

Ahhh, it’s a roller-coaster ride or the WordPress front, the winners of the ‘Strayhorn’ (1.5) theme competition have been announced… now about working these into WPMU form…

Particular congrats to WPThemes who picked up the grand Poohbar!

Hey, big news, guess all the ‘not’ blogging and so on paid off.

I’ve been offered the post of ‘Chief Blogging Officer’ at WebCT developing their community manager operations and communications strategy.

Basically it would involve developing a blogging system to operate on the open web which integrates with Vista, building in full RSS capabilities into the system (a la Moodle) and writing about it all in the blogosphere… markets are conversations after all.

It’s a no-relocation-required job too… so what do you think I should do?

Wow, absolute mayhem as WP is outed as doing some serious ‘cloaking’ serach enginewise, basically the story runs like this:

“The Problem. WordPress is a very popular open-source blogging software package, with a great official website maintained by Matt Mullenweg, its founding developer. I discovered last week that since early February, he’s been quietly hosting at least 120,000 168,000 articles on their website. These articles are designed specifically to game the
Google Adwords program, written by a third-party about high-cost advertising keywords like asbestos, mesothelioma, insurance, debt consolidation, diabetes, and mortgages. (Update: Google is actively removing every article from their results, but here’s a saved copy of the first page of results. You can still view about 25,000 results on Yahoo. Or try this search tool, which searches multiple Google datacenters.)” [Waxy.org]

Such a difficult one to call, should be in the textbooks!

Personally I reckon that first up it’s Google’s fault (this sort of thing shouldn’t be possible) but I have to admit I’m pretty uncomfortable with it. Well, OK, very uncomfortable. It’s a crappy thing to do. Think we should hear Matt out first though.

(here’s the comment I left:

“Let’s hear what everyone involved has to say before going too off the wall. It looks like a dumb move but I know for a fact I’ve made far far dumber.

It is his site, he has put in god knows how much work, he wants to take it forward and who here hasn’t done well out of ‘dishonest’ means before (like lying on CVs, being ‘strategic’ etc.)?

Or has everyone here never done anything wrong or underhand?

So let’s see what everyone has to say and cut the puratanical crap right :o)”)

[I know, it’s tame to leave smilies after saying ‘crap’ isn’t it ;o]

I’ve written about elgg going open source at IncSub, it’s an amazing opportunity to get a very very good eportfolio system going I reckon.

Am going to be posting most of my development, multi-user weblogging, ideas for organisations stuff at IncSub from now on (here’s the feed) and use incorporated subversion more for the ideas, theory, general weblogging stuff.

The idea is that IncSub is all about realising these possibilities… helping institutions, organisations and institutions do really cools stuff with weblogs, wikis, eportfolios etc. while this is more me and my thoughts.

Will see if it works out, do you reckon it will?

One thing though, the more people subscribe to the IncSub feed the less time I spend here saying “I’ve just posted at IncSub…” etc. ;O)