Category: socialware-online

So where did it all start?

Well we needed a blogger app for staff and students to blog from anywhere in the college. And our college has the additional problems of using mac as well as pcs and laptops not only desktops.

So how would we do this? Well I evaluated many blogger apps but they were either too complex or not cross platform. But yes there was one which was simple and cross platform. Chronicle lite

Anyway theres major problems with the graphics display on mac osx, so much of a problem I sent Paul a screenshot of the problem.
Paul replied that he had no mac to test on and that he wouldnt support the mac because of that. Oh, were a little stuck then?

Not if we send him a mac complete with osx! Yes thats right, we are going to send Paul a mac so he can fix the problem and maybe do some of the things we want to include into clite. Obviously because clite is opensource, everything we suggest for development will be open to everyone. Its a odd sitution because everyone wins. Paul gets a new mac, we get unlimited licences of software which does what we want and everyone else can use the same software with or without modifications. Yep the only people loosing out are those who charge for software. It really does pay to go opensource…

And in the spirit of opensource, I will now be plugging clite and its development when ever i can. lol.

Oh and here's Pauls wishlist if anyone else feels the need to help him out.

Smartmobs has a link about the debate between blogging and journalism. And its a really well thought out article at that.

The Rss issue spelt out, with some interesting views from some of the most inflentual people on the net, well worth a read.Dispute exposes bitter power struggle behind Web logs

I wont comment too much, because I havent yet made my mind up. I like RSS2 because its really simple. But prefer RSS 1.0 because its using a standard (rdf) which makes alot of sense. How Pie, Echo and others come into this, I dont know but this is going to go on and on and on. Thank god we can just write xsl which will convert between whatever format is prefered.

So this guy from the school of infomatics is doing some research on writing styles using blogging. My Blog Experiement, do I get involved? Hummm, I'm not sure… Maybe I will.

Hey theres little to loose from doing it, just a little bit of my time, I have to submit all my blogs made during May 2003 and fill in a questionnaire. All for this guys PhD?
Oh what the heck lets do it.

Mainly blogging this one for myself, Data mining.
Just a great source of links for me to read at somepoint soon.

So I have the reasons why blogging should be put into the college for next year, but how am I going to do it? Well here's a few issues and thoughts buzzing around my head at the moment.

First up, how is blojsom going to cope with 1100 students and staff using it?
I know it scales but how far does it scale really? I mean blojsom like most blogging systems seem to be made for single people or groups of trusted people.
What were basicly building is something like moveable type or blogger, the system in which blojsom will exist as such. Here are a few ideas for the system…

1. The simple way = the way i can see it working for now.

We use blojsom on one server under one servlet only. There will be no xmlrpc access, people can only blog by putting the entry files in a certain directory. That directory will be mapped on to there desktops or user area. We will use standard file system authentication to stop people changing other peoples files, etc.
They are welcome to use any kind of text editing tool they like, but we will deploy and have training on one we rate highly. More than likely this tool will support xhtml and be multiplatform for osx and nt support.

2. The email drop

Basicly the same as above but we add email to blog feature for those's who want to blog offsite. I have not yet tried this feature out, but it could be the same authentication problem as xmlrpc, where the person blogging can blog to any part of the system. Which is not what we want.

3. The xmlrpc way = the way were doing it at the moment

This way we use one server and blojsom but allow blogging over xmlrpc only. We deploy a blogging app on peoples desktops and direct people to use that to blog. Now this runs into the major headache of xmlrpc authentication.
First up how do you maintain the list of authenticated users?
And how do you stop people from publishing to areas where they shouldnt?

4. The xmlrpc way 2 = I think the best way at the moment

This is the same as above but we deploy a staff blojsom and a 2nd servelet running the student one. That way students can fight it out and the like but not interfere with the critical newsletter system.

5. The multiple servlets

We deploy multiple servlets and allow different departments or areas of studies to take care of one. But its pretty much the same as the above solution and has the same problems too.

6. The webdavvy

This is based around version 1, but allows offsite access by the webdav protocal. Each persons weblog folder will also be a webdav folder.
Nice idea but it adds another layer of confusion to the system, but this would also allow the uploading of images, audio and video.

So the issues are,
We need to check against our ldap server to make sure the person writing the weblog is writing to the correct folders. And what kinda of configuration are we going to deploy for blojsom?
On top of all this we have to decide on the input for users. We have the oppotunity to deploy a application on the desktops and that also requires great consideration, which I wont go into now…

Dave dropped me a email today pointing me at Amazon RSS.

Another Amazon Web Services experiment. The idea is this: say you're interested in books about weblogs. Wouldn't it be nice to have an RSS feed for all weblog-related books at Amazon, so that when new books became available you'd know about them? Thanks to the magic of web pipelines (Amazon >> XML over HTTP >> XSLT >> ASP >> RSS >> Your News Aggregator), it's become a pretty trivial thing to put together.

Yep this a fantastic use of standard technology, all i need to do now is swap the ASP for XSP…

HP have just realeased a demo of there blogging app, blojsomIT!. At the moment it does a small amount of things but the next step SemBlogIT! looks to be really powerful and clever app which could come in useful later.

I have set it up for testing here. Obviously you need a user name and password to use it unfortually. But you can try out HP's own here.

I hope to add some serious feedback once I try it out over time.

Been thinking hard about blogging for students again.

How am I going to put all this into action?

I think I need to write a paper and presentation, as that is only thing managers and course leaders seem to understand.
What i should do is use main parts of other peoples presentations as the base of mine. I've been looking at the blogtalk 2003 presentations and theres a lot in them i can use to explain the basics and advanced concepts of blogging. Then I can use my personal experience with the last project i ran to put the killer blows in? Hummm maybe i should start writing the paper now rather than talking about it…

the draft outline i've drawn up so far in outline (opml format) and
html for those without a outline viewer

Interesting maybe i should sign up

Its starting, the students are starting to stir…
I noticed a post on our internal newsgroups today, i have omitted some items for speed and convence of this blog

Hello CNDI / CHIRP people,
Just had a fantastic idea which i think might improve
convergence between departments and collaborative working
between students here at college.
Many departments require or reccommend that students keep a
journal or research log of their work… a great idea for
sorting ideas, have been keeping a paper based one for ages.
Howeverf, keeping a notebook of things which intereset you
seems fairly insular, and does not encourage interaction
between students with similar research interests.
Therefore, don't you think it would be cool to set up a
weblog server, upon which students could enter their
research sources and thoughts on relevant subjects onto
their blog, which is fully searchable, and available for
everyone at the college to see?
that way, if someone is
researching the Bauhaus, for instance, they could search the
blogs for it, and share their research sources with other
students. also, for instance, if a Graphics student was
researching the work of Peter Saville, and a Fashion
student was researching his influence on fashion promotion,
the two could get in touch and share information easily.
Do you think this is a good idea? obviously there would be
some issues concerning plaigarism, but none more so than two
students discussing work offline.
Should be technically
feasible too, applications such as Movable Type should make it
fairly simple (which is more than can be said for the video
over IP idea i posted last term)
see ya,
Tim

Great piece which made me think good and hard
Some extracts…
It made me think of weblogs. Initially, weblogs caught on with geeks and kids. These geeks and kids weren't at all interested in ROI, knowledge management, or even in defining what it was they were doing.

Steve Cayzer from HP labs in Bristol, emailed me back with some great links and advice on semantic blogging in the context of education. I've added a lot of them to my feeds.

Oliver Wrede and Kieran Shaw's weblogs are a great start.
Then I found tons of useful links here SeBlogging, been here before for the blogtalk 2003 paper but never had a delve around.
Also found educational bloggers network but it seems very american. Looking for UK or at least european based.

I love this so much, i had to quote it…
Using the Internet as a teaching tool can expand the classroom beyond discussion daily interactions. The purpose of this weblog is to give students in my 4/5 class an opportunity to respond to prompts and their peers' thinking in a new format.

By presenting weblogs to my students, I will enable them to interact in a new way. One students thoughts can be entered into the weblog and saved for another student to respond to at a later date.

In addition to enriching class discussions, this weblog will help students understand the expansiveness of the Internet. Too often, students ask if they can “play” on the computer. My goal is to help them discover the power of computers not as a toy but as a supply of knowledge.

I'm going to write a damm paper one day in August I think… Here are some issues tackled.
RSS: The Next Killer App For Education
Student publishing and privacy
A great collection of blogtalk presentations from this year, I so wish I'd had gone. Maybe next year?

Finally got my feeds working with flock rss reader. So if you now goto my feeds you should beable to see my news feeds I subscribe to.

I've had major problems getting Flock working with Resin and no one really knows why. So I've deployed it seprately using jetty.

Ok I had a try writing my own rss aggregator in xsl and it only works if your inside my network, which is a shame. So I'm now on the look for a java servlet rss aggregator.

Interesting enough the older cousin of blojsom, bloxsom does have this already. Blagg News aggregator for the Bloxsom weblogging system.

Tempting to put a application on the server though… Seems to be quite a few .net ones. I cant believe no one has wrote a server based one for java yet! Specially with things like this done Java Collect

2 hours later after searching, I found it.
Flock is an RSS aggregator written in Java. It is a server-side web application accessible with a browser, similar in spirit to AmphetaDesk
Subscriptions are stored in an OPML file, yeah!

Interesting paper about blogging in education – Thanks Dave.

So yeah its a weird one.
i've been thinking about blojsom and how this affects cubicgarden.com
realisticly i've been thinking this is what cubicgarden was about orginally, but i feel things have progressed on. I want to have solid links I can depend on when quoting things etc. I know you can have Permalink which will basicly do that but the arrangement isnt as I would like it. Maybe its the designer in me screaming for control again?

Anyway what I'm thinking is if I keep my source weblog files as xml then I can always apply a xsl to cetain ones or all of them to fetch out the best content for direct linking and what not. Yeah it seems blojsom does support html and xml because it just outputs the lot to the browser, and of course any tags which dont make sense to the web browser are ignored. So in all my postings I've included a content tag to enclose the lot. It seems about now is when I need my generic xhtml schema more than ever.