Category: socialware-online

Flicked through my feeds today, and found Slashdot had banned me from accessing there feeds. Which is odd because my aggeragater goes and gets feeds only once every hour unless its told by the feed to get it quicker than that – example being the bbc feeds. Anyway, didnt think much of it till I poped into my bloglines account, which has also been banned. Now I know bloglines only gets feeds a minimum of once a hour no matter what.

Your Headline Reader Has Been Banned
Your RSS reader is abusing the Slashdot server. You are requesting pages more often than our terms of service allow.

You May Only Load Headlines Every 30 Minutes
Your RSS reader is abusing the Slashdot server. You are requesting pages more often than our terms of service allow.

In 72 Hours, Your Ban Will Be Lifted
Your RSS reader is abusing the Slashdot server. You are requesting pages more often than our terms of service allow.

Do Not Bother Contacting Us For 72 Hours
Your RSS reader is abusing the Slashdot server. You are requesting pages more often than our terms of service allow.

So what is up with slashdot? Did anyone else get simular messages to me? If there so worried about bandwidth they should consider the standards complient layout.

Just checked over the students bloglines aggeragater. And they are actually using it which is great news. I just need to sort out there blogs now. At the same time I found some other good feeds while searching for the interaction one.
Also found news.com's rss feeds which is very useful. And at the same time I've updated my own bloglines account so it will be the same as my feeds. Lots of work early in the morning…!

I was reading this on wired.com the other day and a good heads up on the state of play for personal publishing.

I had never heard of Wallop, but to be fair to microsoft it looks really good and backing it though the instant messager door is a good move. This is exactly what we've been trying to do with blogs and instant messager for a while now. Give students flexablitiy but depth when they publish. And theres little wrong with bundling already well known features into one packages, this is what makes apple popular. But on the other hand you know as well as I do, its going to be all propitery and propitery plus propitery does not equal fun at all. As wired says, it would be great to see Microsoft adding effort to the Atom spec.

At the same time though, some companys like Nokia are not so sure about user generated content. Sony Ericsson and Nokia have both launched initiatives to encourage people to use their multimedia handsets — one to take and share images, the other to just watch. Seems criminal that Nokia are not embracing the personal publishing idea, well it will be there lost in the end when sonyericsson, microsoft, apple, etc will dominate in this area. Maybe Nokia's Ngage says it all…

Bill McCoy wrote a fetcher to drive blojsom from an IMAP server
Sounds like a great idea, but I still need to figure out abstract authentication for blojsom otherwise things like this mean nothing in the grand scheme of things. That also reminds me I need to check out blauth at some point, maybe I'll give it a going over while I'm waiting for my plane to berlin Friday – Saturday morning.

What’s my plan of action? Hummm i'm faced with 3 different choices.

Ideally there would be a blogging server in college which students could use without too much help. So I could try and convince miles that this would be a good idea and that this would be a test run for next year maybe?
Problems I foresee, is the college libal for anything put on the blog? According to the blog layer I met a while back the answer is no but its not been proven in court yet.

2nd option is to set them up on my own server at home. This would be trival to do, but should I is more the question? hey would I be liable? Would I have to guarantee some level of quality. See what would happen if my line goes down or server needs restarting? Would they expect 24/7 service?
Plus would 12 students blogs effect my bandwidth?

Last option, would be to use a 3rd party blogging service like blogger.com, livejournal, etc. Which would all be down to the students to maintain and administrate.
I would need to reckonmend one or more of the services to make sure I could aggergate the content into a class news feed. Maybe flock or cocoon for logic.
Anyway this 3rd option does make things a lot easier but I would need to also read the end user policy/agreement to make sure everythings clean.

This year the group is very diverse and a blog is a sure starting point for all of them. It will be interesting if it will bring them together as they all seem very disjointed with one another at the moment, which is good as there seems to be very few deers.

Previous blog about bloglines. I found this blog, which is in favor of bloglines. Now i'm glad its useful to that person, but its not all that great! Interesting and simple hack though. I think that will be the last word from me about Bloglines now. hopefully…

Oh my goodness, I've been so slack its unreal.
I keep quoting bits from my blogging experienment last acdemic year, but never really published the final results.
And unfortually I never did, but I can represent what I already have. So here is the opml file and the converted html version.

Some background on the experiement,
I wanted to see how many hoops students would be willing to jump through to blog there work. A few students wrote a xml document which was handed out to the rest of the class in the summer term. The xml document was very long and overkill for a blog, but it was proposed as a blog and cv for a student through out there 2-3 years in Ravensbourne college. Work was done on it by Harry, Miles, Vanessa and Jc – All 1st year students with little to no experience of xml.
The blog was put up under cubicgarden.com and was done without any blogware. So all updates were sent to me over email where i could read them and then put them up on the site. So as you can see its quite a world away from the blog systems you see now. However I choose to make things difficult to test the barrier for entry.

In the end I moved all the blogs to blojsom under the /messaging/blogging/music video catergory. There all there for reading.

Some highlights from the experience

Students form a bond with the blog through what they write.
Vanessa complains about a kidney infection
Poil talks about the project and whole lot more

Students voice there real concerns and thoughts.
Julie vents her built up frustration
and before that
Harry bitches
kelvin tells me the truth without too much fear

In my post during August I looked at the service bloglines. And honestly I have been checking out bloglines over the last month, and I like it but its not for someone like me. I have flock and I use it for reading feeds plus more. Bloglines is perfect for someone who just wants to read there feeds and thats all. I thought avantgo would beable to read my bloglines and display it on my ipaq, but it wasnt to be. Actually Flock did a better job at that.

I havent yet messed with the flock *.war file yet, but i will soon because the javascript open thingy is a pain in the arse. Would also be nice to intergrate the flock css into the cubicgarden one. Obvioulsy all this isnt possible with bloglines. I will be interested in seeing what other services popup and if bloglines will stay up with the massive server and bandwidth requirements needed with every single rss feed added by a user. I mean flock works hard and eats a lot of memory and thats only one user.

Some pictures taken with my ericsson communcam.

Gone to the blogs

Noteable points.

Met the guy behind plasticbag.org, Tom Coates

Blogging for the mainstream
What are the barriers for entry? and should there be any? specially in regards to the live journal, blogger and aol users starting to blog. Is the current blogsphere going to welcome all these extra users?

Are blogs a revolution or really a evolution?
Ground up publishing or peoples voices is the name of the game here?

Blogging outside
Are blogs much more interesting when there focusing outside the blogsphere? Is there too much self reference in the blogsphere and emphase on blogging it first?

Infustructure
Do we have the right infustructure to blog? And I dont mean network. I'm of the view blogs need to be more structured than they currently are. But without making the experience of blogging more complex than it currently is at the moment. I think the metablog Atom spec will go along way in solving this problem. Also this is key in the Semantic web vision.

Why do people read blogs?
Interesting question that no one really answered in depth.

My old bookmarks havent been updated for ages, why is that i hear you ask? Well its not dynamic enough, I feel…

It needs to be like blogging I feel. Which got me thinking, why cant it be like blogging?

It can be, and it now is…A blog of bookmarks. Just need to convert all the old entries into blogs.

Ok Blojsom2 is installed and ready to go, except one thing. I cant for the life of me get xmlrpc working from any blogging app I use. Combine this with the problems I'm having with Clite and suddenly blogging has become a lot more difficult.

Anyway got some nice snippits I found around the net which I'll drop into posts soon as I can. I cant believe its been 5 days since I last posted. Whats going on!

On the back of my wonder about what exactly is track back. Comes this. Comes in multiple formats including Quicktime for some unknown reason?

abstract reads like this,

Customized collections of learning objects from multiple repositories are achieved with simple, existing RSS protocols, creating access to a wider range of objects than a single source. This provides discipline-specific windows into collections, contextual wrappers via blogging tools, and a system for connecting objects and implementations via TrackBack

Presentation by Alan Levine, Maricopa Community Colleges.

Its official now, no dirty work arounds needed. Amazon goes RSS

Amazon now provides RSS feeds embedded inside the HTML pages. To actually subscribe to the RSS you will need to take a look at the source of the page and then find the link to manually add it to your RSS newsreader

Now if only others could do the same…

I'm still to this day unsure of what trackbacks are, and even more confused after reading the moveabletype documatation about it.

I'm not the only one, Bob DuCharme is having issues. And he tries to explain in his post about the same issue.

Bloglines is a server-based RSS aggregation system. Many blogs and newsfeed services publish RSS feeds, special files containing the content of the site formatted for easy parsing. Bloglines allows people to subscribe to these feeds. Once subscribed, Bloglines periodically checks the feed for changes or additions.

My first thoughts are this is good for those without access to a server of there own or no broadband connection. And its looks very simular to flock, but it says there using a combination of things. On the minus side it doesnt allow you to collect the aggeration outputs like flock does. So no sharing onwards which is a bad idea. I will need to sign up to check it out for sure.
It does however let you use opml to inport and export feeds, which makes me wonder what they would make of my many feeds

I wonder what there revenue model will be? email marketing or feed in advertising into there listed feeds? The easy subscription bookmarklet sounds dodgy as heck.

How Much Does Bloglines Cost?
Bloglines is completely free to use. Text advertising and additional fee-based services will be launched in the near future.

Using mailinator for the first time then it would seem. Using the email address testuser@mailinator.com with the password testuser.

Got my validated email a sec ago

Hello,

Your email address has been validated and your Bloglines membership has
been confirmed.

Now that you have a Bloglines account, you can subscribe to blogs
easily. Go to http://www.bloglines.com/topblogs to see a list of the
most popular blogs on Bloglines. Also see http://www.bloglines.com/newblogs
for a list of new blogs, updated daily. If you already have a list of
subscriptions in OPML format, you can import them automatically. Go to http://www.bloglines.com/manage for more information. For an easy way
to subscribe to new blogs that you find, see http://www.bloglines.com/help/easysub

How can we improve Bloglines? We would appreciate your feedback. Go
to http://www.bloglines.com/contact to send us comments.

Thank you for using Bloglines.

The Bloglines Team

Uploaded my opml file from flock and it worked!

So its now, my own flock server vs bloglines. We shall see what happens, you know I'll blog the results.