Articulating the bus

Posted on March 30, 2009 by Reverend

Here one of my many attempts to articulate what I think is the heart of the experimentation we are doing, namely UMW Blogs as a syndication bus. I have a feeling I’ll be making a number attempts over the next six months to makes this clearer—but here is an early attempt. Thank Philipp Schmidt for letting me ramble on.

Audio conversation with Philipp Schmidt about UMW Blogs

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5 Responses to Articulating the bus

  1. Steven Egan says:
    March 30, 2009 at 5:56 pm

    Before Listening: I’m really looking forward to the Mozilla Open Education Course and the things that come from it. This is but the tip of the iceberg. The discussions have already started. It looks like this will be a lot of fun.

    After Listening: It would be interesting to take the republishing thing and include the comments at a single location. Basically the comments happening at the original blog, rather than having it happen on multiple blogs. Even if it is just pointing to the place to join in the conversation.

    Aggregation is being used in the course, and I just rediscovered the needed code for the tag feeds on blogger. That along with coming across http://www.diigo.com is making me want to have my own server(s) and do this stuff on my own.

    Syndication = Self-Publication = Self-Empowerment = Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious

    Just ’cause it’s that awesome.

    Reply
  2. Jason Parkhill says:
    March 31, 2009 at 11:17 am

    Great podcast. A thought about the part on whether anyone out there could get syndicated on UMWblogs: As more WPMu publishing communities spring up at colleges and universities, I wonder if interested parties could collaborate on an uber-community site that aggregates posts from the many different but like-minded communities. Like edublogs but decentralized. It would give our students and faculty a larger stage, a receptive audience and more easily allow them to connect pretty substantively with peers outside the walls of their institutions.

    Reply
  3. Reverend says:
    March 31, 2009 at 1:13 pm

    Jason,

    Exactly, and doing it would be trivial. I often thought that if we had a consortium of schools we could actually have a number of schools blogging from the same WPMu install, each with their own, unique domain. Kinda like what we are doing with Longwood currently:
    http://bavatuesdays.com/cloning-the-umw-blogs-empire/

    Reply
  4. Reverend says:
    March 31, 2009 at 1:55 pm

    Steven,
    Actually your point about aggregating comments is key, and in many ways is the Achilles heel of the syndication bus model. What would really need to happen would be that comments could be posted on either one of the posts, and still be reflected on the other. So, for example, if you post a comment on the post in the course blog, it would automatically re-post that comment on the student own post that is syndicating in to that course blog. This seems a bit more complex, but I noticed, at least in the latest version of WordPress, that comments are connected to posts now, so this may not be impossible–it could very well be a start. But this does not account for how Blogger, Drupal, Typepad, etc. deal with comments. it could get problematic quick.

    How I have been working around this is rather cludgy. I take all the comment feeds for the various student blogs associated with a class and aggregate them using BDP RSS, then I include them in the sidebar of the course blog. Imperfect, but all I can do for now.

    Reply

  5. Pingback: Achilles’ Heel of the Syndication Bus at bavatuesdays

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