Last year, at the 2006 Summer conference in Cleveland, being my first one in the fold of NMC employment, I rolled out a Tag This Conference page, mixing up del.icio.us, flickr, and hopefully technorati content all tagged with nmc2006, the page doing so with some help from a local version of feed2js. Repeated this tagging for the 2006 Regional Conference in San Antonio.

So without too much extension, the Web 1.0ish page is up for next week’s conference spiffed up a bit by bringing it also up as a Tumblog, which presents the feeds from the same 3 sources a bit more stylishly.

Okay, that is good, but…

Then I saw where George Siemens et al for the Future of Education conference (drats, it overlaps with ours, arghh) was using a new tool called attendr to create a map view of conference participants by location plus tags for interests.

So I did what good technologists do- I stole the idea to create a similar one for NMC 2007. I twittered about it… and 8 or 10 friends jumped in and added themselves. I had made the attendr map with colored pins for people from NMC orgs, guests (non-members), and another for first timers (not the best choice since there is overlap, oh well, it is beta!).

And I inadvertently created multiple pins for the admin account and myself (and there seems to be no way to remove) for beta web 2.0 stuff, attendr is more alpha.

Then I used the admin tools to send invites to every registered attendee for the conference (provided from our registration data) to add themselves to the attendr map.

Wow did they respond. In less than 36 hours, by counting names on the list, 138 have pinned their location, about 25% of the participants.

I got a great email from one colleague:

Attendr is great. I am looking to meet people at Cornell, Duke, and UPenn and have found and linked to 2 of the 3. I am also interested in meeting people who work in universities that have non-academic arts programs. Any idea how I might filter the member list for that information? I know that I can send out a general email list request but that seems like casting a huge net for a very small fish.

Wow, if I had thought of that, my email might have contained more explicit examples or suggestions for tagging, as the tags people apply for themselves define connections in attendr. If you click a tag, it highlights everyone on the list with the same tag, and connects them on the map via lines. Powerful. Or, if you click a person, it connects by color coded lines every other person who indicated they “know” or “would like to meet” the person. Wow, and since you add an icon, look what I can glean from Hilary Mason, whom I only know secondarily via her fab work in Second Life on Virtual Morocco, via the map of connections:

and her profile, which gives a bio, her web sites, RSS feeds, her own tags (and connections to others with same), and who has met her or who she wants to meet:

And by checking off people on the list, one can get rather connected quickly:

And by virtue of the URL / map name I chose for the site. nmc2007, automatically, attendr starts collecting flickr images with nmc2007 as a tag (of which there are few, until I get to Indy!)

Attendr has a lot going for it, and much is subtle. There are some interface quirks, and the adding oneself, logging in and out, take a bit of poking to figure out. But the amount of connectivity based on a map, a bunch of users tied by location, 3 kinds of relationships, and self defined tags is very powerful.

But wait there’s more. I went back to the well of the Future of Education Conference (actually yo read the forums, which are massively active- George has a magic touch and great, great friends!) and I rediscovered a tool I had not toyed with in a awhile – PageFlakes, a site that builds personalized pages with different RSS gadgets– much like Google Home page (my mainstay) but with the key feature that one can create a PageFlakes site that is public, viewable by others.

I liked the different things mixed together for the Future of Education Conference, and again, I did what great technologists do- I stole the idea again to created one for the NMC 2007 Summer Conference, with a few discoveries along the way. It does not work at all on Safari (you get a warning) or Camino (no warning, it just doesn’t work). I made one tab for the NMC’s ‘tag this conference stuff’ plus ones that pull in NMC content via RSS feeds- especially cool is the podcast one, where podcast content is made available via a skin that looks and works like a black iPod:

I made a second tab for things of local Interest to Indianapolis, including local weather, pub guides on a Google map, local photos, events, and more.

it’s all rather fluid since you can slide the blocks around to re-arrange the layout.

The downside? My URL “website” is based on an NMC email addres I used to create the account- there seems so way to change it.

But wait there is even more. At Faculty Academy, I liked how they set up the TwitterCamp (and Adobe Apollo app), a conference twitter account, to display activity from everyone twittering who was a “friend of fa07″.

Once more, as the best technologists do — i lifted the idea. But I went down a wrong path to customize the app. I downloaded the Flex environment and flailed away at imported the TwitterCamp source file, made new versions of the PNG images for the skins, but got off base trying to re-created the app in Flex. With some emails to Andy, my palm (of my hand) slapped my forehead, as there was no need to recompile the app- a right/control mouse click on the TwitterCamp application file, select Show Package Contents allowed my to copy new PNG files into the content, edit the config.xml file, and voila! I had a TwitterCamp app, with NMC colors and logos:

So now I can install this (by dl-ing both Windows and Mac versions of Apollo RunTime it can go on any machine) on any computer at NMC, and have a dynamic Twitter screen of people’s tweets about the conference (or their kids or cat or dinner or ….)

So now I have a pile of things to set up and talk about at Indy,all of which is possible because of the friends who’s web sites I frequent and who let loose with their ideas.

Lastly, the blog post title is for you Dr Glu, who has been a Twittering Monster on song lyrics and such. Rock on, yes you Sgt Pepper on your 40th.

A portal, or enterprise information portal (EIP), is a Web site that integrates an organization’s knowledge base and all related applications into a single user-customizable environment. This environment acts as a one-stop shop, or “gateway,” for users’ information and system needs.

So it was with a bit of cynicism when a GSFSE (Google Search For Something Else) landed me on Zimbio a home of “portals” or “community sites about specific topics”. But these are not your Grandpa’s Enterprise Portals of say… 4 years ago; these are sites fueled by RSS, aggregation, etc… maybe even (can I really write this?)… “Portals 2.0″

Gasp.

From a quick glance, it looks like these Zimbio sites offer special interest groups some tools to build a community site that is able to pull content from RSS sources, photos from image sites like flickr, Webshots, built in keyword tracker tools that yank content from Google and Yahoo, tossing in IM, chat, discussion forums, all which mmix on a group customized “home page”… AND, spit it all back out as an RSS feed and an OPML of the site’s sources. Not bad, at all.

Yikes. Small Pieces. Joined.

So, for example, there is the People’s Guide to Global Warming featuring bookmarked web sites, headlines from 3 RSS feed sources, latest entries by keyword from blogs (tracked by Sphere, a blog search engine), a group shared image gallery, a group blog, news headlines from by keyword search from Yahoo and Topix, images syndicated by tag from flickr, and keyword searches linked from Google. And that’s all on the front page.

And as a tap for my friend and colleague at UBC, there is a Zimbio community for Guitar Lessons, and it has a similar, but slightly different set of tools- the images here are syndicated from Webshots, and different sources are used for the feeds.

So maybe it’s nothing revolutionary, but this is not the multimillion dollar enterprise software from 5 years ago, it is free, hosted, and powered by underlying open standard technology. It could be an ideal aggregation platform or home base for a project or topical interest group.

What could be next? Is it Push 2.0? Top 5% of All Web Sites 2.0 (let’s not forget stinking web badges!)? Blink Tag 2.0?

A few barks back, I was trying to find a way to incorporate data form a Google calender into a wordpress powered site. Editing the calendar was slick in the Google Calendar interface, but sipping out content… well I tried some WordPress Plugins (mixed results, difficult to control output, or to get events in the right order); tried some AJAX code but later found this was yielding RSS telling me the calendar changes, not the date order– and lastly, using an iCal plugin.

This effort is for NMC’s Second Life Campus site — my grand goal is that as people start to plan classes, meetings, presentations here, we can get them to toss it on a gCalendar. Maybe too grand.

Well heck, I should have gone outside for a few days and shoveled some rock, since just waiting would yield what I found today – Google Calendar now has a tool to generate on an external web site– a Calendar like display. It’s perfect! Instead of wrestling with parsing of RSS/iCal content, I get a pretty wall calendar- see http://www.nmc.org/sl/calendar/. It sits inside an HTML iframe (need to look at that for layout/accessibility problems).

The only thing missing now are… some things on the calendar. Another project in the making. I also have a wiki going (not yet opened) where we are writing mor of our user documentation, and hoping to get some participating from those using the NMC Campus in the writing of it.

Sometimes in this fast paced world of technology it just pays to wait… but not too long.

So I cam going to cover three “next level” things you can do in del.icio.us, two of which I had not even checked out before last week. I am sure there are more treasures in there, and remember that just about everything… no make that everything displayed in del.icio.us has an associated RSS feed.

A Groovy MP3 Player
The del.icio.us PlayTagger is a tiny tiny piece of JavaScript code you can add to any of your own web pages. It automatically adds a little Flash player to any link in your page that points to an MP3 file:

And when the little triangle clicked, it starts playing the MP3 without leaving the page!:

This is much better than the link blasting off to an empty page, or launching some other application. And it provides a quick way to tag the audio in your own del.icio.us account.

The code can be added to the HEAD portion of your HTML. Or, as I recently discovered, it can be pasted into SuprGlu’s “static content” section (the stuff that gets put in the sidebar of a Glu page), and it will provide the player for any MP3 link- see the NMC Glu page.

If you start tagging MP3s in del.icio.us, they will display in your own pages there with the player as well. That offers a different way to collect your audio content– if you use a unique tag for your MP3 audio you want collected together, you can then have a direct link (and RSS feed) for your audio files.

So as an example, all of the podcasts we are producing for the NMC Second Life project, as well as ones that originate from others, can be assembled by tagging our as both podcast and nmc. A few older links had tags for podcasts because they were articles about podcasts… by combiinng tags, I can have just the ones I know are MP3s. A better approach might have been a custom tag like “nmcpodcast”:

http://del.icio.us/nmc_campus/nmc+podcast

The MP3s still need to reside elsewhere to have their own URL; del-icio.us makes a handy container to arrange the,.

Tag it Forward
The for:xxxxxx tag is very userful, and should be in the mix for looking at the social aspects of social bookmarking. Adding this tag, where xxxxxx is a del.icio.us user account, allows you to “send” an interesting link to someone else. For example, I started using for:dnorman for sites I thought D’Arcy Norman might enjoy. I still have them tagged in my collection of links, but they end up in a special place in his account (the “links for you” link at the top of the del.icio.us pages).

For example, at last week’s NMC conference, I tagged the bookmark for a nice presentation about Drupal. Just for curiosity, I added the for:dnorman tag, and obviously, D’Arcy was checking this part of his account, as he later blogged about this link.

With just a mouse click, I can share links with others. For example, some nice person has been sending a few my way with the tag for:cogdog:

When I check my “inbox” I can then just click the “save” link if I want to add this to my own set of del.icio.us links (and it lets me know what tags te other person used; I can use theirs or my own).

I know some instructors have set up del.icio.us accounts for creating class web resources (see this Chemistry set by Liz Dorland at Mesa Community College), but end up creating a shared account, or asking students to send links by email. Ugh. With this method, students could easily “forward” links to a teacher, or TA, or web site keeper. Or, the other way, if a teacher has students with their own accounts, as they find relevant course materials, they can “for:xxxx” tag resources to send to specific students.

It is harder to explain in words- but the for: tag is an interesting way to share links, without email, without blogging, etc. Just one click…

We Are the Network
And now…. del.icio.us has another subtle tool that allows you to “aggregate” bookmarked sites from a network of people you choose. All you need to do is add a del.icio.us username to your “network”, and the “your network” link will continually display the newest sites that all of your networked friends have added. For example, my network has by Canadian buddies, plus the sites I am tracking in a separate account for our Second Life resources. Small network, but you can see if you have some key del.icio.us bookmarkers, you can leverage their own activity to bring new sites to you.

flickr foto

Cactifitti
available on flickr

This is a photo from last year’s trip to Hawaii, but someone found another one from this same place and invited me to share it in a flickr pool devoted to grafitti on plants (who woulda thunk?).

This is near the top of Makapu’u point on Oahu.

I usually wax about the beauty of the web providing a nice for every interest you can and cannot imagine. The twist that social software like flickr provides is an incredible enabler for this process, and for ways for both the niches to discover new niche-dewellers.

An event that has happened twice recently has brought this to my attention.

In my fascination for macro shots of flowers, I had popped up a shot of a bouganvillea in my year, it looked a bit like a human face. Ina matter of days, a comment popped in there, flattering me (nice touch, always), and inviting me to share it in a flickr photo group devoted to this flower. Now I would have never guessed there was a group devoted to this flower, but there you go.

But the kicker was today, when a comment appeared on a photo from last June in Hawaii, an oddball shot of some grafiiti carved into a prickly pear cactus.. And shazam, someone finds this, and gently lets me know there is a flickr group on Vegafitti:

The group deals with the narrow aspect of Graffiti that occurs on Plants (i.e. Trees, Succulents, and elsewhere while the plant is still alive). From the classic carving of the initials of lovers in trees with a heart around it, to more odd forms you may notice.

While many of these carvings may kill the plant and this group is not meant to encourage this activity, it is meant to document this aspect of human behavior, both artistically and socio-anthropologically.

Also, feel free to discuss the subject/topic or anything related to it in the ‘Discuss’ section.

So heck yes, I joined, and even dug through my CD of archived photos for this other one I had not yet posted on flickr.

Now one can just tsk-tsk at the strange hobbies and things people devote time to, but everyone has a passion for something, be it flowers or defaced plants or ….. But let’s not underestimate again the beauty, flatterning, electricity of being able to find like minded people in your niche of interest. This is the essence of social software, and like D’Arcy Norman said last february, it’s not about the software, its about the social processses it enables.

Silly hobbies or powerful connections?

And while on the subject, I was cleaning out my flickr groups subscriptions, and completely forgot that I had started one last year devoted to interesting photos that have achieved a PhotoShop like effect w/o any editing- In Camera No PhotoShop group — it sat there for months with only my 2 photos sitting in the shallow pool, but today I noticed ther are 18 members and over 300 photos…. and a lot of great commentary and discussion.

It works well in flickr because (a) it serves an indivudual need in an area of strong personal interest (photography) and (b) flickr has made it easy, quick, and fun to share photos and make comments.

Flickr pools are a great resource to educators, yet not very widely used.

I forgot the reference, but someone last year wrote about social software having a sweet spot between providing something of invidual value (organizing my own photos, searching my own bookmarks, syndicating my links to my blog) and the power of tapping into the larger shared collection of stuff. Flickr has hit this sweet spot almost as best as one can.

Now go out there and revel in your niche. You are not alone.

On first iteration, it required you to click a JavaScript bookmark tool for every new comment you posted. ( forgot to do this 9 out of 10 times. Then I got clued into a Firefox Greasemonkey script that automated it. I worked well for a few weeks, then Cocomment changed and the script got more wonky. Then following a clue from Amy G, I found coComment has developed its own Firefox extension that sits in the bottom of your browser, works reliably, and gives you a visual clue when your cocomment streams have some new additions:

Cocomment tracks your comments, and those by other cocommenters who are in the same conversation in a public page, e.g. http://www.cocomment.com/comments/cogdog. I have it as an RSS feed in my aggregator too, but as you can see, my own stream is pretty much my comments and the ever prolific Gardner Campbell, a.k.a Dr. Glu (another story). So in the hand of a few users, you do not yet have (or I do not have) the Wisdom of Crowds thang.

Gardner is a grand commenter, with zest, irony, insight, and clever references, he comments all over the web… and he uses cocomment to syndicate his external activity in the top of the sidebar of his Gardner Writes blog

There is a new feature, where cocomment lists your “neighbours” (apparently this is a British feature?) – the co-comment pages of other users who have commented on the same conversations:

Potentially, it might provide that hop, skip, click way to find interesting content and people the same way surfing del.icio.us taggers does.

And “tag!” you’re it, you can now “tag” your co-comments (I have not even wrapped my head around how/why I might do that:)

Bottom line, cocomment does something neat, it aims to connect a strand of external content that are usually not connected, it is evolving new features, yet I am just not absolutely sure if it is finding the “sweet spot”, the so-called Tipping Point into Something Really Big (That Might Even Be Bought By Yahoo/Google/Microsoft/…..).

But I am using it, keeping an eye on it.

Previously mentioning SuprGlu and how I was somewhat Hooked On Glu. What the Glu does is allow you to create a public page that aggregates content you select from multiple sources (as long as the sources provide RSS feeds) into one nicely presented web page view. the “tools” for doing this are wonderfully simple, and it took literally minutes for me to create my first Glu’d site.

This is pretty much a tool for creating public views of aggregated content, what here I am calling “Outward” Aggregating. Bloglines sort of straddles this line by creating a person’s collection of RSS syndicated sites, but provides a URL for sharing publicly.

There is emerging a different suite of tools, and ones that bear the nifty interface of AJAX code. For some time I have been using Google’s “Personalized” Home that allows you to add new info sources to a personalized page, choosing from a small set of existing Feed sources and weather, as well as a window into your Gmail account. You easily Add COntent via a sidebar that scoots in when called, and on the page, the AJAX interface allows you to re-arrange the content blocks at whim.

I’ve been using this for a number of months as the home page on all my computers. Heck this is really just a new variation or Son of Yahoo, or maybe the Second Coming of Portals, but this is pretty light weight stuff, with all kinds of sources to choose from.

But other folks have been creating new modules for the Google Home Page (I think it is just bits of XML), and are now being collected in a new Google Modules site, which is expanding every day. You simply select a service, click “Add Module”, and it redirects you to your own Google page, and provides the cut and past URL for a feed that goes into the Add Content area (ok, I really need to buy a copy of Camtasia so I can screencast this stuff). You get some sort of warning from Google about using outside code, but I clicked through the luke warm warnings.

I already had a few site RSS Feeds here, my own blog feed, the weather for Phoenix and Pine, AZ. But I just added to my Google page a display of one of my flickr photos (random on each page view), my del.icio.us links, a Creative Commons content search box, and a dynamic display for our web site’s stats from Alexa:

Now that is getting very handy indeed, and might have me click the old Home button a bit more. I’d prefer to have a flickr feed of my recent photos (like the RSS syndnication tools it provides).

But I cannot share this with anyone as a link- I am merely aggregating my stuff (or other’s stuff) from various sources, into my personalized display. This is pretty much what I am calling “Inward” aggregating.

In a similar vein is NetVibes (thanks to a tip via Gardner) which somewhat parallels Google’s approach with a simple tool editor, the AJAX display and flexibility, but there are some interesting differences:

The GMail interface is better here since it has a toggle visibility to list the 5 most recent message sin your inbox (each hyperlinked). NetVibes has its own tool for adding your flickr photos, with flexibility for what is displayed, and how ti is displayed (slide show or icons). It has a built in tool for listing documents available in your Writely account. The Web Search widget offers you a choice of Google, IceRocket, Yahoo, and WikiPedia. The display of RSS feeds provides an icon to refresh the display (note to Stephen Downes, EDU_RSS is not accessible as it does not validate). There is also a “NotePad” feature where you can write anything.

I do find this interesting, a single page that is pulling content from sources I choose, not what Yahoo gives me, not what Blackboard gives me, not what MSN gives me. And it pulls them from many sources very efficiently.

The other thing I am thinking more about is the use of space, and navigation features that are certainaily beyond HTML tables and static display. One of my goals next year is to get my head more into the AJAX jar.

So while the old song RipMixFeed still sounds good, we ought to be thinking along with that the perspectives on how the collected stuff is viewed. There are different needs and reasons for going Inward or Outward in your aggregating.

Revealicious is a set of graphic visualisations for your del.icio.us account that allow you to browse, search and select tags, as well as viewing posts matching them.

* SpaceNav (demo), which allows you to explore the structure of your tags in a rather recreative manner.
* TagsCloud (demo), which is an interactive and enhanced version of the tagscloud available in del.icio.us
* Grouper (demo), which is an experimental interface for grouping and working with tags.

More or less, you plug in your del.icio.us account details, and this site provides some interesting graphic tools to “reveal” relationships in your tagging methodology (or lack thereof?). On a quick toor, SpaceNav, provides an interactive view of how your tags are inter-related, so starting with my tag for “blogging”

Rollovers on the small dots in the circle dynamically change to visually reflect the relationships with other tags that I have used– I am guessing the goal is to develop some patterns that emerge from one’s own tagging habits.

The TagCloud tool is not the same one you might be familiar with that just shows larger text in proportion to frequency of tags

Each click on a tag changes the other tags to give a sense of their connection (or not)– but the unique things are clicking multiple tags to see the relationships that emerges, for example above, my tag clouds for “podcast” and “rss”. Then if you click the search button, you see all the sites tagged as indicated above.

Lastly, the Grouper tool does a few things in one interface.

At a high level view, it provides a snapshot of highly common, common, and lesser used tags by placing them into 3 groups. This might help you clean up less frequently used tags. But it gets more interesting as you mouse over tags, and color bars are superimposed on the 3 groups to show how many other tags in that group are related to the one under the mouse.

This is another thing that is cool and beckons for more than this cursory look. Visualizing the data this way potentially can reveal things not apparent in a large pile of data, but better yet, this is all made do-able because del.icio.us exposes the data to external applications and developers who cook up groovy things like Revealicious.

A tip of the blog hat to Robin Good for his Sharewood Picnic Number 18, a weekly feast of provocative sites. Yum.

I’ve yet to join the merry gang of Podcasting Is The Greatest Thing Since ________, but I do so a value of adding more audio content to our site, capturing events, meetings, interviews etc. This will be a hasty and haphazard explanation of what I did, cause I really want to get home and have some dinner ;-)

First of all, I will be capturing the audio on the cheap, plopping down a new iRiver iFP 799 MP3 recorded (1 Gb model with external line and input ports). It’s a love hate relationship -I love being able to record like 40 hours of audio on this thing the size of maybe a role of quarters, and I love the audio quality. I hate, despise the user interface on the thing. I cannot even remember the simplest things- each button has about 5 different functions. Someone could do a thesis on how crappy the human interface is.

I used it at our September 2 meeting of our Ocotillo Online Learning Group at the request of colleague Holly Beene. Holly was our first presenter, and in Frijolero – Inspiration and development of podcasting inspired Grant Project in Intercultural Communications, she was sharing her idea for having students do some audio production of what she calls “Digital audio postcards”:

My goal is to put a human face on culture. I will explore the learning potential of students’ first hearing and reflecting on a variety of authentic stories in digital “audio postcards.” Students will then construct personal knowledge through identifying, composing, and recording a brief original story. The research question is: will personal stories constructed in capsulized audio correlate to students’ ability to develop supporting detail for assignments and to retain course concepts?

The project evolved in the confluence of narrative tradition, my personal love of audiobooks, experimentation with digital storytelling, and a random drive-time report from Youth Radio in May 2004 – a four-minute Border Story from Tijuana presenting a point of view sure to surprise and engage many students. It did. If the instructional use of audio, a medium students are clearly attuned to, can be used effectively as a simple storytelling device without the time commitments and technological challenges of multimedia, then the project could easily be extended to other courses and disciplines.

She asked me to bring the iRiver to show the audience what she is considering using for recording. I thought to myself, let’s go one demo better, and record her session to attach to the meeting notes. So I got a 31 minute recording without too much trouble… so I thought we ought to be doing this for presentations at future meetings. And then I thought of a few other projects where we had recorded things like student panel discussions and session presenters… and I saw a web of audio and podcasts somehow tied together.

I first considered using the desktop podcast desktop creator Feeder (Mac OSX) which did a decent job, even handled the uploads and had template options for the various podcast formats. I was seeking something that would not only render the feeds, but do somethings to allow my to add some summary/descriptive data for a set fo feeds.

So I rolled up my sleeves, pulled out my decrepit version of MovableType 2.661 and created a mini site that would not be for creating a blog, but for creating a series of content files I could use site wide via PHP includes. The use of the MT Enclosures plug-in allows my feeds to add the RSS enclosure tags for any linked MP3 in the blog entry file.

My individual templates include

* about.inc: a general chunk of HTML to explain “what is a podcast” and add some links to reference site. This can go on a summary page that explains a project’s podcasting content… on the OLG example, the 2nd 3rd paragraph and the bulleted reference list are from this file.
* content file and RSS feed for all reference podcasts we will collect. This will go to a future overall MCLI podcasting page yet to be created.

I use categories to associate entries with different project sites, so there are 3 category templates:
* a detailed listing include file- includes the title, web reference URL, description, and date for an item that includes an MP3 audio. This provides to info in the box for the on the OLG podcast listing. Since the updates will be not very frequent, this is much faster that running it through an RSS parser. The one tricky thing in my template is I am putting the URL for the site it references in the MT keywords field, and I need to make sure the MP3 is references as a link in the post body. The stubby template looks like:

<ul class="podcast_sum">
<MTEntries  lastn="20">
       <li><a href="MTEntryKeywords"><$MTEntryTitle$></a><br />
       <span class="posted"><$MTEntryDate format="%b %e, %Y %I:%M %p"$></span><br />
        <$MTEntryBody$>
  </li>
</MTEntries>
</ul>

* a short listing used for site navigation sidebars. This is just a simple list with links to podcast content, and is used to populate say the smal left side bar listing on the OLG main page. This is even a shorter template:

<ul class="podcast_short">
<MTEntries lastn="5">
       <li><a href="<$MTEntryKeywords$>"><$MTEntryTitle$></a></li>
</MTEntries>
</ul>

* and a category RSS feed, to be the published URL for the podcast, e.g.:
http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/podcast/olg.xml

With these pieces in place, I just need to use MovableType to publish an entry, and associate it with a category, and it will create the RSS feeds and the little content nibblets I can use across my web sites.

I have this in mind since our double events happening Friday we are grabbing a good chunk of the presenters as audio.

Titled “Knowledge Sharing with Distributed Networking Tools”, the content provided hits the ground on all good points:

* Excellent collection of resources on social netowrking tools etc, your smorgasboard of small pieces loosely joined
* The way presented is so appropriate- posted on a part of free hosted wikispaces site (I first learned about wikispaces from Leigh’s blog, and have put it to some use over the last year). Stack this up next to some bloated multimegabyte static PowerPoint full of word slides and see which is more useful and meaningful in the long haul
* The wikified presentation makes good, clean use of Creative Commons licensed flickr images. Makes it look appealing as opposed to a drab text wiki (looks count for something, eh?)
* All content is blatantly CreativeCommons-ed

Sections range from Read/Write Web, to RSS, to Social Software, to Tagging, to Creative Commons, to “Rip Mix Feed” to the Future Virtual Learning Environment.

If you are into new collaboration tools, etc, this one is a keeper!