After all these years (like maybe 7? 8?) RSS is still so hot some regimes may wish to ban it, but it is the magic magic magic glue that makes content move around the web.

Here is one little story.

At NMC, I run a WordPress powered site to publish stories our Second Life work at the NMC Campus Observer, but we have only a handful of authors, and I must publish 98% of the content. Last year I had an idea to cleverly (I thought) embed a second WP site inside, as a NMC Campus Community Calendar, where people who were part of the NMC SL Community could post events. It is actually a second WP install in a sub directory, branded and designed to look like the main site (I wrote this up last year as Blog in a Blog).

That is just the set up for the scene of this movie. Well, just a story.

(1) On Sunday, Tayzia Abbatoir (SL identity of the curator of the art collections on NMC Campus in SL), posted an event on the Community Events Calendar site on Flickr Gettr, a really neat project on its own that fetches images dynamically from flickr as part of an art exhibit. It’s very cool.

(2) Within 3 hours, that same story is republished automatically on the front page of the the parent site, the NMC Campus Observer, by use of the WP-o-Matic plugin, that is able to do this by regularly checking and parsing the feed from the calendar site. (Yes Reverend, I ought to be using FeedWordPress… later).

(3) From the RSS feed on the main NMC Campus Observer site, this story is viewable in Second Life on some RSS screens we have been setting up all over our lands there:

From Second Life, you can click the “View” button in bottom right to open the full link in a web browser.

(4) But wait there is more RSS magic. I have twitterfeed set up to automatically tweet stories published at the Campus Observer to an NMC twitter account where this story is now re-broadcasted… automatically

(5) And the story moves along, retweeted by Beth Harris who adds some bits to it as mini commentary:

So to recap, I tracked:

Blog Post –> (feed) -> republished in second blog– > (feed) republished in Second Life and to twitter –> retweeted in twitter

And beyond the first creation of content, all of it was automatic or moved along by others.

This makes my inner (and outer) geek so happy. If paper burns at 451°F, what is the temperature of a hot RSS feed?

Many will regret (or will lie and say they were there) missing last night’s presentation performance by Jim Groom and Tom Woodard as the norm-blowing closing act for the 2008 NMC Rock the Academy Symposium. You have to wade through this blog post to get to the video recording ;-)

Donning their gas masks, flame throwers, and edupunk t-shirts, Jim and Tom laid out the warnings of zombies and where they lurk in educational technology. The audience was warned before hand that this was going to be an intense, almost radioactive presentation, so we provided them safety glasses ahead of time.

They started asking the audience what their fears were.

[16:33]  Redbaiters Stanwell: What are scared of?
[16:33]  CDB Barkley: getting sued
[16:33]  Elli Pinion: lack of money
[16:33]  Oggie Ballinger: Budget cuts
[16:33]  Corwin Carillon: accountability
[16:33]  CDB Barkley: losing students
[16:33]  Mae Mathilde: lack of control
[16:33]  Rane Mistwallow: security
[16:33]  Hyperion Sands: privacy
[16:33]  Ginger Questi: change in almost any form
[16:33]  Hyperion Sands: IP
[16:33]  Bron Bloxome: IP -retention rates - globalisation
[16:33]  Sarracenia Lupindo: too many students
[16:34]  Ninmah Ash: technology
[16:34]  Eliana Jigsaw: parents complaining
[16:34]  Rane Mistwallow: educational technology
[16:34]  Caspar Lefevre: chipmunks
[16:34]  Ninmah Ash: tornadoes

Jim and Tom then launched some opening strongly worded (and pictorial) warnings about zombies and where they lurk. And then when Jim yelled “Look all around you!” pandemonium broke out- the sky went dark, the corporate placards revealed their true hidden messages, and several zombies revealed themselves from their clever “normal person” disguises. Jim and Tom managed to thwart them off (for now) with their flame guns.

And then they went on to describe how to counter-act the zombies, that there is a solution…. becoming an Ed Tech Survivalist:

and learn the techniques of troutlining for information as taught from the Alabama swamps by Fishing with Tom (“the internet is just like a big swamp”):

Now this was just the fun part. Tom and Jim went on to succinctly describing the ideas of syndication, aggregating, tagging, re-organizing content using free, open source tools that liberate your organization from the zombie grip. Now while I’ve been tuned into their work for a while, I could tell for the audience the power shown in the UMWblogs examples and site wide feed tagging were really revolutionary.

You can get more of their resources, including the preso slides, from their conference session description on the NMC web site.

This was just stellar, and I cannot gush enough about the message these guys from Virginia blasted into Second Life. Don’t take my word for it, check it out yourself:

Well, that was not fully correct, as there was a fair amount of awareness here of virtual worlds and Second Life, but when I asked the audience of 50 or so how many had Sl accounts, there were maybe 5, 7 hands raised. A number of others let me know they were there because “it sounded nothing like the other sessions my employer told me to attend” or “we’ll never use it at work but I want to know what I am missing”.

Actually it was am enthusiastic crowd and laughed at my silly pictures and anecdotes. I gave them a taste of Levine’s Law (“start with the damn demo’) so I was in Second Life after the 4th slide, showing them a desolate empty place (one that is a standard looking classroom).

I tried to present some viewpoints of skeptics; like gamers who hate the lousy graphics or lack of tasks, the fearful who are not excited after an encounter with a giant Phallus on Orientation Island, etc.

I returned to SL to do some quick site visits- went to the Virtual Hallucinations exhibit from UCDavis, the map collection from David Rumsey, the interactive maps at Daden.

Well I had fun. Here is the slideshare myPlick version of the show, but it lacks the snarky commentary.

You can find links in the presentation and the tour stops at
http://sl.nmc.org/wiki/Busy_Second_Life

As of tonight I have spent extensive amount of time walking the green carpet and tossing out objects.

Actually I was there for about 20 minutes. Seriously (or semi-seriously), I have been involved in Second Life since March 2006, but mostly in a role of working with our NMC events, managing media, and running group activities. I have not really built anything, thought I like to boast about the quality of my plywood cubes. I have tinkered a bit with some scripting.

But now I have a space to tinker, to express, or just to mess around in. There is an intoxicating allure of this as some virtual level of power?? Maybe, maybe not.

So I am mulling over what to do here. And no, I am not going to erect a dog house, or anything really in that metaphor vein. But I am stretching for ideas… either that, or I am going shopping.

Land Ho!

It’s very cool, and has the great attribute of what I am attracted to in Web 2.0 land- it’s free, easy to set up, gives useful features and services, and once set up, you can forget about managing it.

But I just came across one I thought I had seen in an earlier incarnation, that does something similar, then again, very different- Frappr allows you to create a map for your site, but it is a Google type map, and your site visitors can add their own “pin” to geolocate themselves, add a photo, and a short caption (or shoutout). So in some sense it is a web site guest book, but mashed up with a map.

I first saw it on the Center for Digital Storytelling’s Storymapping siteand scratched my head and said, hmmm, how might I use that? It then seemed to make sense to have it as a feature on our NMC Campus Observer site a WordPress pimped site we use to share our projects and events in Second Life. So on our version, a Visitor’s Map, we ask visitors who have been a part of NMC’s activities, to geolocate themselves, but to use their avatar names and photos as a label. I was able to customize the choices for pin colors, so people could self identify if they were from NMC member organizations or not.

As a sidebar, I created it on Friday, and 2-3 people added to it without any effort. A blog post and an announcement to the SL Educators listserv added a whole set of new of listings, and at least half are people I don’t think I’ve even met before.

It also provides some web stats, so might service as a really (really, really) basic stats tracking tool

So no, this little web app will not revolutionize e-learning, replace your course management system, or make you web famous for 15 nano-minutes, but it’s one of these things that makes me say hmmmm, took little effort to experiment with it, and rummages around my mental pile of web resources as something that may have a use down the road.