i’m sorry, i just don’t know

I’m not a programmer.  I’m a novice mash-upper.  I needed to figure out how to gather, aggregate, and publish the blog posts of community members to my existing website.  My constraints:  I couldn’t just set up a wordpress blog to do it.  I had to display this aggregation in our existing community website.  And, my current site did not support any additional forms.  So here’s how I did it…

1. We have a Society website up built on Wild Apricot that lets me set up members only pages.  I set up a “Submit your Blog” page there.
2. Since Wild Apricot has no API (boo!) into their data, I had to find an external form service, enter:  Wufoo.  The free account lets us build up to three forms.  They store the data (which I’m not concerned about because it is publicly available blogs) which we can access via an online API.
3. I manually (here’s the clunky part) add the feeds to Yahoo Pipes which publishes them out as one aggregated RSS feed.
4. This feed gets turned into a widget by me and Widgetbox.
5. I copy the code for the widget into my community site, and everything is right in the world.

Why a community site is good for an Association…  We want to be clear that we support collaborative engagement around issues relevant to our industry.  Only our MEMBERS can contribute to the conversation.  People are motivated to do this because it builds their online reputation- a powerful motivator as can be seen by the popularity of Web 2.0 apps that support online identity development and social presence (think Facebook- a multi-billion dollar company).

Widgetbox is an online repository of widgets for your website.  My favorites:

• Target Firefox Adsense - This widget only shows your firefox adsense to IE users.  So don’t bother your readers who are brilliant enough to use practically anything other than IE.  Besides, it’s only IE users who click on ads, right?
• Google Site Translator - Let people translate your site into their language.
• Meebo me - Chat with people on your site.

You can also “widgetize” your own blog or site to share with others, and produce or find iMix widgets that let you play mixes of music on your site.

For the first time since I heard about the project long, long ago, I finally had use for Google Books.  Today I was searching for an architect in the 1800s named Andrew Jackson Downing who wrote a book about Country Homes.  In the past, Google books has really just felt like a tease- because I wasn’t looking for books in the public domain.  The books I’ve been presented previously just had excerpts, and a link to whatever vendor showed up on top.  Today, I found the book I wanted, was able to read through the parts I wanted, and even was able to see which passages were popular (ta da).

The papers from the Folksemantic web tools project are now available on the COSL Website. link

You’ll find information on the tools we built to enable the finding, reuse, remixing, tagging, and sharing of open Web resources. Projects include Send2Wiki, Make a Path, Ozmozr, Relstore/Scrumdidilyumptio.us, and the RDF Content Licensing tool our engineers built for Plone.

So I’ve been looking for tools for an average web user (i.e. not a programmer) build mashups. Yahoo Pipes sort of gets there by letting you aggregate, filter, and manipulate feeds, but my new favorite is Mash Maker from Intel.

Intel® Mash Maker is an extension to your existing web browser that allows you to easily augment the page that you are currently browsing with information from other websites. As you browse the web, the Mash Maker toolbar suggests Mashups that it can apply to the current page in order to make it more useful for you.

via justin via slashdot

So it only took me 4 years, but I finally have a focus for my dissertation.  I’m going to look at 3 systems that support online resource-sharing around open educational materials.  Open Learning Support (OLS), a discussion environment that wraps around MIT’s OpenCourseWare materials, Ozmozr, an aggregator/share tool, and 51 Weeks, a tool being built to aggregate conference goers’ blogs, and photos that also incorporates a synchronous/asynchronous chat.  No link yet to 51 weeks… it’s under development.  It will deploy at the OpenEd 2007 Conference in Logan, Utah in a couple of weeks.

So why is it that dissertation writing requires so much junk food?  My dog is dying to go run in the park and I can only sit on the couch eating candy corns, typing.  This process better not take too long or I’m going to gain fifty pounds.   How many calories does typing burn?  Maybe I’ll start a new exercise fad… micro exercise.  Measure your exercise output in nano-calories.

“Over time, it seems like ‘open’ tends to win”

Walled garden vs. Open Social Web

Your data is your data, you should control that, not a corporation like Facebook.

Robert Scoble went to Plaxo to interview them about their new online identity aggregator based on microformats.   And in spectacular new open economy form, it’s available as open source software for anyone to use.   See the interview.   There is also a pretty clear description of what microformats are, should you be interested, and willing to watch for more than 2 minutes.

Of course, our favorite profile aggregator is Ozmozr. Because it’s cool. And because we built it. And because it has a social/sharing component. But this isn’t an advertisement for Oz, really.