I have no idea why, but the post by Elizabeth Lawley a few weeks back bemoaning the state of CMSes and stating her desire for an open source option seemed to bring responses from every direction. This one contains a host of options, most of which were familiar but there were a few new ones.

• Spaghettilearning.com - out of Italy but seems to have multi-language support, PHP and MySQL-based.
• Xtention.Net - they offer a free version of their LMS for organizations that only need to deal with SCORM objects. It's ASP, SQL 2000 based.
• MnITS Internet Teaching System - relies on  Apache, MySQL, and PHP (and I wonder if it is in fact the same systems as another one out of Minnesota that I am currently looking at named MnMaster?)

I will have to recompile the list I have going at http://www.c2t2.ca/article.asp?item_id=3744 as these are coming out fast and furious. I think some finer cateogires are going to be necessary too, as some of these (moodle, atutor, many others) look a whole lot more than others like what we have come to expect from a full-featured CMS. - SWL

Busy, busy, busy -- it's easy for me to stop blogging!  But I'm back for now.

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David Wiley has a personal weblog.  I'm looking forward to his more personal, daily reflections on the world of learning objects. [Thanks to David Carter-Tod for the link]

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Tim Bray on "Why XML Doesn't Suck"

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I want all sites to be news item oriented, unless the user specifically opts for a non NIO site. Unfortunately most of the themes we have go the wrong way. I want them to be news item oriented because: 1. All the other blogging tools, Radio, Blogger, Moveable Type, etc are NIO. 2. The nice editing tools and the blogging APIs are also NIO. 3. A lot of the complexity of Manila melts away with NI orientation.

So, after I get the theme done, I'm not totally done yet. I've budgeted about a week for a new page for managing your weblog posts, that works much like the "desktop website home page" in Radio, or the main editing interface of Blogger. I don't like the way Moveable Type does it, while they have lovely graphics, there are too many steps in creating a weblog post, their interface is klunky. I like simplicity, transparency.

This completes the transition to Manilaô we started 2 years ago. The homepage was last on the list, because we decided to do it back to front. We converted every department in the organizations and nearly all of our client schools. I must have trained 300 people on how to manage their Manilaô site.

Sean McGrath: "It's time for the Semantic Web proponents to stop trying to teach us to think at their level of abstraction."

A thought-provoking piece that deals with a very real problem ("every layer of abstraction costs you 50% of your audience"), though I wish the author had spent more space developing his alternative vision of "semantic shadows".

More reactions in and around Don Park's blog. In particular, in these comments Danny Ayers stresses the need for more appropriate representations to make the RDF porridge more enticing to humans: "Everyone agrees that this syntax is ugly. But it is meant for machine- not human consumption. If you wanted to grok it, then you could generate a visual graph or use a domain-specific tool."