I guess I am holding onto the MediaWiki install in anticipation of what the folks over at UBC are working on. A real way to take sections of a MediaWiki articles and republish them anywhere with a YouTube like embed code. All the better, the changes you make in the Wikipedia article are reflected in the post with the embed code. Very awesome for thinking about dealing with content management in distributed ways. So the MediaWiki is still very much an experiment that I am trying to wrap my head around, and keeping it in there, is definitely as much a part of habit as hope.

So, in short, if my previous comment seemed like it was defending an idea, it has everything to do with trying to make sense of this space in order to truly work through to see if this is more a creepy tree house than a useful and lightweight syndication architecture.

And your comments are extremely helpful int hat regard. I love you, Mike

I will respond on the other stuff soon.

I think I’m just saying that rather than putting the *text* of of the book capital in a wiki, that CommentPress might be a better option, precisely for the reason that the tag-based aggregation is great idea — by putting the stuff in the CP architecture, comments I make in my *own* blog that reference the work become visible as trackbacks, which I don’t think happens on the wiki — on the wiki I have be a sharecropper on your wiki plantation, right.

Meaning, what I love about CP as an annotation scheme is this:

http://twobits.net/discuss/comments-by-section?comments=chapter2

That’s my comment on that text, but it lives on my blog — I think this is what you’ve been doing with aggregation, just expanded.

Does that make sense? I’m really only talking about swapping out the wiki version of the text for a CP site.

The rest is very awesome and I plan to play around with it later this week.

It’s quite possible I misunderstand the capabilities of the wiki as well though….

That is an excellent example, and it could be just one more element here. The only reason I might avoid making that the space for a class, is because this isn’t really a class anymore. it is a series of resources freely available that any individual or group could come around and start interacting with in a wide variety of ways. For example, they could blog their reading, create a collaborative wiki article/essay, form a Ning group, tweet their progress, etc. So my idea is not to think of this in terms of a class, but as a space that is primarily concerned with aggregation, yet provides quick and easy tools like a blog or forum that people can use.

Now I would imagine most folks would use WordPress.com or blogger or TypePag, and that makes total sense, as it would for them to use wikispaces or another forum space. What I am trying to do here is bring together all these elements to trace the framing of a series of open tools that are heavy on RSS and aggregation so that folks get a sense of two things:

1) RSS and aggregation is currently the best and easiest way to frame a distributed discussion that is not specific to any one class or group of people. The tools here do a pretty nice job of demonstrating this process, and CommentPres is yet another way to skin this cat, and a really effective way I might add.

2) The power of owning their own work yet sharing it freely is best exemplified through a framwork like this. Sharing your RSS feed and brining your blog content into a specific community of people thinking about a similar text doesn;t force you to blog somewhere else, or joing yet another community, rather the place you live (be it a blog or some other publishing space) becomes your key to sharing freely yet maintaining your own work within a personal archive.

It is on this last point where social/community sites seem to fail in this regard, you put your stuff in there, and often their isn’t an easy way to get it out. My point here is you should be demanding a publishing space where you can freely share parts of your writing via categories or tags with a resource like this so you aren’t doubling up effort and you can still maintain the space in which you do most of your work. Piggy backing on that sentiment, the inability to grab feeds for tags, categories, and authors is one reason why I am still disheartened with Ning, Blogger, and Typepad, for unlike WordPress these features seem absent from these services, making the ability to truly filter and feed select parts of your work all too difficult.

That is what this site is about, filtering content from where ever you author it to be fed into a space that other can see, interact with, and ultimately create a distributed community of thinkers that isn’t necessarily limited to the traditional ways we understand the formation of a class. Does this meandering response make any sense?

http://twobits.net/discuss/

That would allow discussion, videos, pics rants and the like to become annotations of the original book. And the product of the class would be your annotated edition —

Of course it’s not either/or — you could still have the student blogs have posts that linked to specific parts and posts that didn’t, all posts would be aggregated, but those that linked to the text would show up as annotations via the magic of trackbacks…I just think it might integrate into the wordpress discussion better than the wiki….