Dienstag, 28. Januar 2003

Mapping thoughts. Joe has a string of very interesting posts on cognitive maps and topic maps. [Sebastien Paquet] Thanks for the link, Seb. This is right next on my agenda: How can mapping tools be used in combination with personal Webpublishing and Weblogs? [Sebastian Fiedler] 4:57:12 PM

Weblog comments and news aggregators. RSS 2.0 has a neat feature that allows an item to link to comments about that item. Content tools and aggregators can support this feature, allowing people to comment on an item directly from the news aggregator window. This document is a case study that shows how UserLand's weblog tool and aggregator both support comments. By illustrating this, I'm hoping that other tools and aggregators will also use this feature of RSS. Walkthrough Don Park is a friendly guy and I imagine he won't mind if I use his weblog as an example. Look at his RSS feed, and look at any , and you'll see a element. Its value is the URL of the comments page for the . Radio knows that it should include the comments element because Don has comments turned on. If the feature was turned off, the weblog tool would not generate the comments element. I subscribe to Don's feed. When I see one of his items, in the rightmost column, just below the POST icon is a picture of a pencil. When I click on the pencil, Radio opens a little window containing the comments for that item, and it's ready for me to enter my own comments. Here's a screen shot that shows what the aggregator window looks like. Summary If you make a weblog tool that supports comments, your RSS feed should also support . If you make a news aggregator or reader, you should make it easy for your users to comment on feeds that support the RSS feature. [Dave Winer] Like so many other times I am not quite sure if and how this will apply to Manila product development. Will the discuss links in Manila be encoded as in the near future? [Sebastian Fiedler] 4:57:12 PM

Blackboard and Weblogs. I was just fussing at an instructor because he was making all his announcements permanent on Blackboard, when I realized that this is pretty much what a weblog does.  It shouldn't be hard to add RSS and the metaweblog api to the announcements page of a Blackboard course via Building Blocks (this is my pet project of the moment, assuming that I get time and can learn enough Java - I'm off to the users conference in February, so I might learn something there). [David Carter-Tod] David keeps exploring how Weblogs could be combined with LMS... [Sebastian Fiedler] 4:57:11 PM

Editing Radio Weblogs. Like Albert, I've become a big fan of NetNewsWire. It's tremendously easier to wade through a long list of rss feeds with NetNewsWire than Radio's aggregator. Additionally, you the Weblog Editor makes it easier to format posts since you get no WISYWG editor on a Mac with Radio. Damned good piece of software. (I posted this using NetNewsWire). This page describes how to configure NetNewsWire and Radio UserLand so you can use NetNewsWire to edit your Radio weblog. (There will be similar pages for other weblog systems too, of course.) [Ranchero] [Joe Luft] I have been keeping an eye on NetnewsWire for a while. As soon as I get OS X on my machine I will try this piece of software. The Radio news aggregator sure has got some serious user-interface issues. Userland has certainly good ideas and creates powerful software... but they seem to lack a user-centered design approach for their product development. [Sebastian Fiedler] 2:38:12 AM

A pmachine School Home Page -- More Debate. Remember "School Blog or Not," that great site that was tracking the debate of one school district in terms of Web logging their site? Well, Bill is back, albeit briefly with some results. They ended up picking p-machine. But their debate doesn't seem to be over. Quote: "This weblog, which was just an experiment in the first place, may stay cold for a while until phase two - empowering of non-tech-savvy educators-begins. Or not, we'll see. There remains a real difference of opinion within the team who developed the site regarding the need to empower end users as well as re: the value of off-the-shelf CMS/weblog tools - truce was declared so that we could actually get a site launched (and hence the IMO completely gratuitous ColdFusion layer) but subsequent developments may merit more discussion." And then there's this site which talks about implementing Moveable Type with a college class. And Joe is playing with MT as well. The "Dream Tool Debate" is started at Albert's Disruptive Technology Site and I'll try to cross post my thoughts there eventually. All I know is at this point I'm getting the feeling that as they "get" the concept, more and more teachers are going to be willing to test drive something. But I'm still afraid they're going to leave it on the lot if it's Manila, for all the reasons I've already discussed. [Will Richardson] Though I share Will's opinion on some of the Manila user-interface problems, I believe that most of them can be solved by smart template and theme design. In fact, I have just created a Manila/Frontier based Webpublishing environment that basically hides most of the interface clutter and confusing preference options from the user. This is the way to go, I believe. Manila is a kind of multi-purpose tool box and needs to be tweaked and adabpted to a particular use context. This requires some initial effort but its flexibility for future redesigns and extensions is a great asset in the long run. I would say that most of the problems that Will has reported so far can be attributed to the lack of appropriate template and overall learning environment design. The free ready-to-go templates that are circulating for Manila were not designed for educational applications. In addition, an implementation approach cannot entirely be modeled in the templates or themes. There is more to a guided tour into blogland than presenting the "perfect tool" right from the start. BTW, this holds true to any Webpublishing tool you want to use in an educational context. [Sebastian Fiedler] 12:38:40 AM