Alrighty, so am thinking about this a bit more.

What I would like, I reckon, is a wiki app which worked a bit like this:

1. User (registered or unregistered, ‘spose you can always build it Captcha / spam blocking to sort this) comes along to enter info

2. Info form consiste of a.Title b.Time (default to now but changeable) c. content (which can include images, audio etc.)

3. User enters info and submits, this lot of info has RSS version and presentable form all to itself. It’s a discrete chunk of information but still wiki-editable (i.e. by other people)

4. This chunk is then stored in a big bucket with all the other chunks which can be browsed, searched or pulled into particular areas by the title (but we’ll worry about that later). The main thing is that it lives with all the other chunks in a nice pure RSS & viewable form where it can still be changed and we can then do stuff to it.

Now… the first thing that jumps to mind here is the WordPress ‘page’ creator (you can see how that works if you have an IncSub Blog) , it creates exactly the content I’m talking about, gives it an RSS version (I think) and drops it in a place called ‘pages’… but while you can register and then post pages on a WP blog pretty easily, it’s still no wiki (and the chunks aren’t editble). So that’s out.

I know this looks a bit simple but from a basic perspective this is what I want… no linking, WikiLanguage (apart from formatting… if I have to) or anything particularly fancy… just a chunk creator, a place full of chunks (preferably with a basic list so that they’re easily browsable first up), chunks each having discrete RSS versions and chunks remaining editable.

I guess I want RSS because I know what it is and these can then be happily syndicated.

Alrighty then… I need a wiki that has all the register / login functions but which I can hack (this should be interesting…) to give me several entry fields which then spit out in RSS feeds.

What I need are five fields.

Entry Field 1 – Time
Entry Field 2 – Area
Entry Field 3 – Title
Entry Field 4 – Content
Entry Field 5 – Tag (set to alist but can add new ones)

Which spits out obvious RSS 2.0 in a fairly obvious way (time, title & content – with description).

The tricky thing is how to include ‘area’… the tags are going to be for topics and I’d like for there to be a set number of them with the opportunity of creating more so they’d definitely fit as categories but area… hmmm…. I was thinking that it might be possible to dump this at the start of the content (which would then make it pullable via any reader that read the first, say, 20 characters of the content) but am not sure.

So am in a fix, I figured mediawiki might be the tool for me to try and hack to do this as it spits out RSS (I think) is nice and robust and has all the register / login features and a fair bit more besides but am not sure, anyone recommend any other wikis I could have a crack at for this?

Also, am I approaching lunacy in what I’m trying to do… is there a quicker way for me to wiki-ise this?

Hmmm, so in order to work in academia you need to have a PhD…. shame shame shame Eötvös University!

“Centre for English Teacher Training (CETT) of Eötvös University has been given a heavy blow by the Dean of the faculty, who has decided not to renew the contract of 9 staff members once these contracts expire 31 August 2005. His only explanation has been that the 9 people still do not possess a PhD degree” [Bee]

Heh, I concur:

“I remember well Brent Simmons’ proposal of a” Law of CMS URLs”:

The more expensive the CMS, the crappier the URLs.” [details of a global brain]

It’s all coming together… wireless connectivity at Blogtalk Downunder is to be supplied by iBurst… so you’ll know who to love when the connection kicks off and who to bawl at if…. but that won’t happen will it :o)

Going to be odd, this’ll be my first conference talking to a bunch of laptops… hmmm… have to figure out some attention grabbing tricks!

Fantastic stuff, I’m going to be contributing a chapter on the blogs and education front to the forthcoming Uses of Blogs. A genuine chapter in a real, paper and um, shiny stuff, book. Am very very honoured to be publishing in the same vicinity let alone on similar pages to the fantastic list of authors they have got for this, especially Trevor Cook, Jill Walker, Alex Halavais, Jeremy Williams & Joanne Jacobs.

From Snurblog (Axel’s the co-editor):

“As an edited collection of scholarly articles by experts and practitioners in their fields, Uses of Blogs offers a broad range of perspectives on current and emerging uses of blogs. While there are considerable connections between many of the themes addressed in these articles, and between the individual contributors (demonstrating the social networking facilitated by the blogosphere network), these articles will be grouped into a number of key categories which address key uses of blogs from both practical – blogs in research, blogs in business – and conceptual – blogs and identity, blogs and community – perspectives. Each of these categories are framed by a brief piece introducing the articles and providing a wider context…”

I reckon I’m going to be seeking just a little bit of assistance as I pull my chapter together!

Fascinating, thorough, thought provoking, broad and intelligent overview of open source, social networks, online learning, long tails and all of that kind of stuff.

Delivered in the most inaccessible, un-open-source, huge and annoying format possible (I mean, if you’re going to have slides then at least use the Adobe slide function???)

Eh?

Update: Hey, it’s great to be the public :D Here’s a much more easily viewable version of the survey, thanks guys… I’ll now be pestering everyone I work with to have a look at it too!

Fascinating data from an enormous pool (30k) of respondants.

Cameron Reilly needs your help to get up to 1000 respondents in his podcast survey to extrapolate meaningful stats, so if you’re feeling kind and generous pop over there and take the survey!

Interesting stuff, Syamsul (who must have the most detailed about page I’ve ever seen!) picks pLog for his schools multi-blog rollout program because:

* My school doesn’t host our own web servers, so systems like Blojsom or Roller are no-nos
* We can’t afford to pay a lot of money for it, so commercial systems like Manila or Movable Type also can’t be considered
* pLog’s interface is cleaner (read: less confusing to end users) than the likes of b2evolution, nucleus CMS or even Drupal
* WordPress Multiple User is unfortunately still too buggy at this time for such a deployment
* pLog has a summary page which is really handy
[syamsul’s domain]