Regards,
Joe

Are we actually agreeing?

Man, once we’ve killed off Bb, what’s next

Cheers,

Bill

@Bill:
In fact, I couldn;t agree with you more, and I just got out of meeting here at UMW talking about your Drupal aggregator as a directory/archive/visualization piece for all of these feeds from blogs. So, Drupal is integral in killing Bb

I think you’re overlooking your little friend — you know, the one with the vacant eyes and the funny blue hat? You know — this one.

All kidding aside, this is where Drupal’s taxonomy, and the ability to tag feeds on import (an important step in recontextualization) and the ability to import the original user’s tags (thus preserving as much as we can of authorial intent ) allows for a nuanced approach to managing large amounts of content.

Wordpress is certainly the king of blogs, but at a certain point blogs become data, and Drupal’s roots as a community based CMS with core taxonomy functionality simplify managing large amounts of data.

Cheers,

Bill

I just teste don my set-up: I’ve done the sitewide-categories they way drmike explained and yes, each category “tag” has its own feed.

http://www.homeschooljournal.net/tags/category/pictures/feed/

Sometimes it’s way more interesting and fruitful to mull these things over in blogs & comments than the forums.

The only problem I see with the sitewide feed is it doesn’t filter anything, so you get everything and if you have a critical mass of bloggers, that could be too much. As for the categories, is there a way to harness feeds for site wide categories? I haven’t really seen it done, I was hoping to do something similar with MuTags, but they don’t have feeds on a site wide tag-by-tag basis just yet (although you can get it for 50 bucks, which I would invest in).

What I’m thinking here is, allow people to opt into a particular aggregator blog, or even the frontpage/portal aggregation by dropping of their RSS feed. Hey, they can even just drop off one tag/category feed from their blog. For example, you have a course aggregator for all posts dealing with your Early American lit class, you have a tag or category “earlyamerlit,” and you drop the feed in the sidebar of the course aggregator blog. Now, this might be done just as well with a site wide feed or category tag feed, but it requires everyone to use the same tag or category (which can also lead to problems), make the students define their feed, allow them to use your a WPMu blog from the community or some other service like blogger, wordpress.com, etc., and just drop off their feed.

This would build in a certain amount of lightweight openness that won’t restrict (or lockdown) everything to a specific university WPMu blogging system, but tell students that they have to manage their own digital (where ever that is), and we just want their feeds -just like the Little Shop of Horrors. This gets us out of the support and archiving business, and allows us to focus on managing the information flow, to paraphrase the great Brian Lamb.

And Andrea, I know you know all this, but this is part of the “clarification and cohesion” my original post did not afford, you have provided the occasion for me to elaborate, so don;t let my comment fool you, I know you know this already, in fact I learned much of it from you on the forums