Category: socialware-online

Just get out of the whole page deal?

My Feeds are back but this time there powered with Resin 3.09 rather than jetty. I like jetty a lot, but you got to handle it to Caucho, Resin is super fly… Anyway what this will mean hopefully, is less out of memory errors, a lot more speed and more up time generally. So check them out.

I am becoming quite obsessive about sites that provide RSS feeds but only a line or two. Some drive me up the wall when they only show the head title and nothing more. The whole point of Syndication is syndication surely? I understand that news sites want to drive people to the site. So take BBC for example, there feed only shows the headline and a brief paragraph of text. Fine, I can live with that…
But I can not live with sites like xbox-scene.com which only show the title or much worst still ftrain, Jono the blog and demosgreenhouse. I'm sorry but for example Douglas Rushkoff supplys a full feed without any trouble and he's blog is read by many many people. Techdirt Corporate Intelligence is a another example of how easy the temptation of full feeds can be…
I dont really understand the reason except advertising for not showing all the content in a feed?

Just a quick note to say Nokia's Lifeblog is now nearing its launch date.

The higher level aggregators have started coming about. One of notice is Kinja which uses xhtml 1.0 strict and css in its site. But doesnt give off another feedm which is a real shame. So I count this as more a end of the line aggregator, kinda of like google, etc. Still prefer bloglines, but ultimatly the best is still something like flock, which gives off a rss feed too. I have started using cocoon's aggregator, which is pretty awesome too. Specially because any one with a bit of xsl can knock out decent feeds.

At long last Spiked online gets RSS 0.91 feeds. Well its about time… Maybe at somepoint they may adopt a nicer stylesheet driven website, as those tables and javascript really is heavy and a not needed.

Never really questioned what the wfw:comment was in the blojsom rss feeds were up untill now. Google lead me to the well formed web.org. Sounds interesing enough, just need to spend some time investigating sometime very soon.

Theres also some really nice services on the website. Including the google2atom webservice. Going to subscribe to the RSS feed for sure.

Dear friend of mine (SarahK), has been working on Lifeblog. Now theres little information on this service at the moment except a mention on the feature and a sneak preview on BBC. Maybe this Nokia turning on its heels about people generated content? Who knows, but I douht it unfortually. Will be interested to see it working though, wonder if Nokia are going to run somekind of service or will it link into another social network or blogging service? Still think SonyEricsson may have the upper hand with there camera come phones and the services which will come with it, look out Kodak, there after your digital market.

Talking of which techdirt has some great pieces regarding the above in different ways. First up SonyEricsson and my Kodak comment, the lines are blending. Kodak are sueing Sony? Enough said about this for now. The other one is good and bad news for sarahk, better interfaces needed for mobile phones. How on earth can they patent touchscreen mobiles? Hello you not seen the Ericsson T380? all of 4 years ago? And theres been plenty of others. I'm shaking my head just thinking of it.

I was flicking through seblogging when I found this interesting web service via this post.. It is described as…

Your Online Filing Cabinet for Useful Web Pages Furl is a new web browsing tool that lets you save and organize thousands of useful web pages (you know, the ones you want to save for future reference but then can never find again) in a personal “web page filing cabinet”.

Once saved, you can effortlessly find any page again later using a powerful full text search tool. With Furl you can forget trying to save and organize dozens of bookmarks, forget saving web pages to your desktop, in fact forget everything except how to find a useful web page again next time you need it.

As Sebastian Fiedler rightly points out, the interesing thing is that you can fiddle with the rss feed it gives off. So this will basicly do what my bookmarks page does already but with a little xsl can be tightly intergrated into anything. I'm thinking about for example a reading list of not only books but websites for my students. Or with a little aggeragation you could pull together a couple lecturers or even students favourate sites into one feed. Nice.

I've been reading Dan Saffer blog about his experience on the MA Interaction design course in Carnegie Mellon for a while now. And I just caught his post about his interview by elearningpost.com.

Anyway I wanted to write a comment to Dan, but felt I had lots more to say and should bother him too much about it all. Oh its also good to see he now provides his rss feed in complete form. Wish more moveable type users would do this. Anyhow I'm going to pick through a few things in the interview.

Why do you blog your course?
In a way, it's about justifying the personal and actual expense of leaving work and going back to school: something I could point to and say, see, that's why I'm doing this, this is what I learned. This is why it was worth it. – Exactly…I really believe students are empowered by blogs because it not only gives them a voice but allows them to compare experiences with others in simular situations. See it would be great to have my interaction students commenting back all the time while Dan and others commented on the interaction blog. I know Dan's doing a MA and my students are doing BA but that shouldnt make a difference. In broader aspects blogs are great for justifing work to yourself. I look back through my blog and cant believe the amount of projects I have running and I can always check up on there progress even years later.

Didnt know Dan's class had a project blog. He finds it more useful than email, but I wonder if he finds instant messager useful too? I see lots of equals with my students wanting to setup there own website. For any of my students reading, read between the lines…

Has blogging helped you increase your learning network?
Dan brings up some healthy problems with blogging generally. The whole problem with quoting and citing is one so difficult to solve. I tend to say who dropped the idea or quote, but not too much because yes it can get really stupid. Only a couple of times in the interaction blog have students quoted me, and they tend to be Ian said today. As a open lecturer, I'm not that worred about students taking a little credit for something I suggest but it all depends on the situation. On the RSS comment thing, its a problem but I feel the barrier to entry is just right. Someone needs to change from RSS reader to web browser so they can write a comment. Most wankers wont be bothered to comment, while those who do really wanted to, and will leave something interesting to read.

I'm starting to question the reasons why I decided to give each year group I teach a blog. If you check out the 1st year interaction blog you can clearly see lots of useful information and ideas. Its also been used as a general notice board at the moment for arrangements and planning. Which is fine, just interesting to see happening. Those who dont blog are either not that bothered and usually dont turn up to my lessons too much or dont have a easily available blogger.
Have a look at the 2nd year interaction blog and its windy city. Very few posts and little in the way of interest, no offense to HarryT or Paulo of course. So i'm thinking join them up. It would be trivial to do, as all blogs are stored on the filesystem as text files. The hardest part would be arranging categories and telling everyone the new xmlrpc address. I could redirect everything else though. Or even with the intiative of people.rave.ac.uk – I could finally offload the blogs to a real place?

Ok I'm sorry but sometimes I read about the progress of mobblogging and i'm not exactly as thrilled as I when I first heard about it. But this is a whole different matter. I'm loving the idea. Instead of mobblogging yourself, why not let your robot dog do the hard work. And it makes so much sense, cant believe people havent thought about it before. Whuffie takes most of the photos.

welcome to the world's first and only “roblog”. currently, a sony aibo robot dog and a er1 / tablet pc based robot post automatically to this site throughout the day, and once and awhile a human (phillip m. torrone) does as well. roomba to be added this weekend.

Blojsom uses the Atom API – which has caused a huge divide in the community. Alongside the older blogger and metaweblog API's. So its pretty much forward looking. I havent spent enough time looking at it but there seems to be a few good applications already, even if there only demos.

People have started writing plugins – Yeah its not exactly the moveabletype community but you know what its the start of things? By the way, has every mac user gone nuts for ecto? And I need to try out NetNewsWire's Atom beta.

Ah ha, I knew I was right, blojsim is broken in Blojsom 2.xx. I tried and tried to get it working a while back for myself and my students. So I'm also assuming that pop2blog is also broken too?
Anyway, I'm holding my breath for blissim?

I need an alternative to blogger apps, because one of the interaction blogs is going great but I think the other one would get going if there was a simple way to blog without owning a laptop, going home or the obvious webadmin thingy. So I've been playing with pop2blog and blojsim again…But I believe none of them work in the multiuser backdrop of Blojsom 2. Which is a shame because I really need to keep the momentium going. Which reminds me I need to transfer Blojsom to a college server at some point in the near future. Mines fine for now, but I can not offer any backup or promises that things will stay up… Users use at there own risk basicly.