A month's worth of archives in Radio

http://radio.userland.com/discuss/msgReader$16510

http://publish.curry.com/rss/

You know where this is going!

I finally got to understand what RSS auto-discovery was good for by perusing this example page  [found thanks to David], which points to Mark Pilgrim's Radio auto-subscribe bookmarklet. Once you have this bookmarklet in your link toolbar,

Whenever you visit a site that you want to add to your Radio news aggregator, click your "Subscribe" button on your link toolbar, and it will try to find the site's RSS feed and auto-subscribe you.

If you're using Radio, you can try it out here, on this very site (note the sneaky tactic to get more subscribers). It worked for me, at least on the home page. Of course a problem is that not all weblogs support auto-discovery. In the worst case the button seems to just do nothing.

If you have no idea what I'm talking about, you could start on my page on personal news aggregators.

A few days ago, Shifra showed me how to turn on the popup comment system on Manila.  I apologize for not writing instructions on how to do the same on your site.  Jake Savin provides instructions for doing so on ManilaNewbies.

From what I can tell, this feature will work only with news item oriented Manila sites.  David Davies asked about having this feature extended to all discussion group messages and stories -- but I don't know of such an extension, which would be useful.  So it seems that one might have to switch to a news site to get this feature -- which one might not want to do.

"Learning objects and e-learning standardization bear the imprint of the ideology and culture of the American military-industrial complex--of ways of thinking that are related either marginally or antithetically to the interests and values of education generally and public education in particular."

Wow, I'm glad somebody said it! But then in reading this informative paper by Norm Friesen, it looks like somebody already had in a major way - he cites a reference to a work that sounds really interesting in this regard, the The Classroom Arsenal: Military Research, Information Technology, and Public Education  by Douglas D. Noble.

I'm not sure I actually hold out that much hope of the educational community's voice being heard in the larger arenas where commercial developers and industrial training agendas seem to dominate. But it is great that these kinds of objections are being aired openly, especially by someone as knowledgeable in the field as this paper's author. - SWL

(Below is the first of hopefully a few posts on tools I use to do research online that I thought might be of general interest.)

WatchThatPage belongs to a general class of software sometimes called "Web Page Change Detection Tools" or services (cf. http://staff.philau.edu/bells/keepup/detectit.htm - although WatchThatPage is, ironically, not on that list). The tools offer a way to be notified when content from a specific source, typically at a specific URL, has changed. In the case of WatchThatPage, it allows you to create lists of URLs and set up a reporting schedule, and then generates an email detailing the changes to these pages since the last report. This particular package only reports on those pages where changes have been noted. This is particularly useful for things like watching job postings pages from companies you'd like to work for, or else (the way I use it in the edutools project) watching product news pages to be alerted to new releases and other time sensitive information useful to one's research.

I have tried most of the software listed on the above referenced page, and this one has emerged as my personal favourite, in no small part because it is free. What I've found with these services is that there is a trust factor with such applications. At first you're not sure it will actually catch the changes and alert you in time, so there is some reluctance to depend on the tool. I've found this particular tool to work very reliably and have yet to catch it out or get too many bad results, the other main peril with these applications. But if you do have such concerns, my suggestion would be to start small and do it only for a few URLS in parallel with your own other efforts, and as you start to see that the system is in fact alerting you to the things you want to look out for, then start to add more sites for it to monitor and roll back one's manual efforts. - SWL

A few additional webpage change detection tools not contained on the above referenced list:

• TimelyWeb - http://www.timelyweb.com/help.html
• WebSecretary - http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/websec/ (open source project)
• WebSitewatcher - http://aignes.com/