The Aggregator is the piece of Radio that downloads news items from RSS feeds on a regular basis.  I have an idea for something I'm calling the 'transBlogger' which will automatically syndicate content from the Aggregator.

Here's the idea, silly as it may be:

There may be blogs/bloggers that you respect and, whilst you may not agree 100% with every post, you think they are worthwhile and should be widely disseminated.  You are probably subscribed to their RSS feed but may not want to have to approve/comment on every item.

The transBlogger will allow you to choose to automatically syndicate their content to your own blog.  It will take the latest story or stories (you choose how many) and put them in a special area on your weblog home page.  This will be controlled by a macro so you decide where and how they should look (within certain boundaries).

Important: Each story will be clearly identified by source and will be linked back to the source.  You aren't appropriating their content, just pushing it to a wider audience.

Of course nothing stops you from also posting items from news with your own comments.  Indeed you'll still want to do this as the transBlogged content will change quite quickly as new stories pile up in the aggregator.

I very, very loosely based this idea on Tedd Nelson's concept of transpublishing.  In fact probably only in so much as I was thinking about transpublishing the other day when I also thought of this. 

But there ya go.

SchoolBlogs is a weblog about using weblogs in schools to give students and children a means of expressing themselves.  It also aims to be an excellent way of handling collaborative projects and introducing discussion.  It is co-sponsored by Peter Ford and Adam Curry.

The SchoolBlogs site is even more interesting in the light of the fact that, in just a few years, every UK undergraduate will be required to create a profile of themselves and what they do.  My first thought on seeing a blog was that this would be a fantastic thing for students to have.  So much better than the rigid profiling / record of achievement packages that were being developed back when I was directly involved with all of this.

New students at University should be taught how to use a browser and how to post to their shiny new blog (along with some guidance about the use of personal information and the unnacceptability of hate material).  They should be encourage to blog early and blog often.

In parrallel Universities should be indexing all the blogs their students create.  One simple application of this might be to suggest links to people to help build communities.  Example:

Indexing reveals two or more blogs that mention Death and the Penguin, for example, and detects that they do not currently link to each other.  The application could generate an email to each blogger pointing at the other blogs and recommending that they may have similar interests and should take a look.

I think this could have powerful effects.  I could imagine that, in the future, you could link this to something like Cyc and create a system for automatically cataloguing and relating information that is not explicitly linked together...

More on this later I'm sure...

In the 'today programme' on Radio 4 this morning Ed Sterton spoke to a NY physicist this morning about a paper she had published on string theory and it's implications for the multi-dimensionality of space.  Despite explanations her explanations, which I would love to have a transcript of, Ed bravely soldiered on asking "what does string theory mean?"

Next up was a British chap who had pretty much the same things to say (along with plugging his new book).  Again Ed valiantly perserved with this quest to understand.  'm with you Ed.  I didn't understand a word of it.

However one thing the last guy had to say was very interesting.  In describing space he called it our "cosmic habitat."  He also asked the question of whether we could ever understand it.  He likened this to the problem a fish has in understanding the water in which it exists.

Hmmm....