It seems pretty simple. If I post an image on flickr, I go there (or get an RSS feed) to see what comments have been added. If I want to see what people said in response to my blog posts, I go here (or again, read my own feed). Same for YouTube.

Any place online I post some media, it makes sense that that is the place to find out what people (in my case, I am just hoping that someone notices) say in response.

Not anymore when media gets reposted in other places via feeds.

For example, the networking Plaxo (which I visit about 4 times a year) subscribed to my flickr feed, so all my photos are republished in Plaxo, like this one originally posted in flickr:

What is really shoddy, and actually violates my flickr creative commons license (by attribution). is that plaxo does not provide a link or credit to the source image. But that’s beside the point- when someone comments on my flickr photo as published in Plaxo- the comment stays in Plaxo. The source media has no connection to the comment made on another site.

More? In Facebook, where I have no idea ever how I set things or enabled them, somehow I managed to have my blog republished there as Facebook “notes”

Unlike Plaxo, at least Facebook provides a link at the bottom for View Original Post– though it does pass it through a Facebook redirect URL where it is storing those micorbits of your click activity for who knows what purpose.

But again, should someone post a comment to this “note”, which was not created in Facebook, the comment is kept inside the Great Wall of Facebook. The original source of the content, my own blog, does not know of any comments posted on it in Facebook.

The same goes for FriendFeed, where you can generate a stream of content from many of your online publishing sources:

Like Vegas, comments made in FriendFeed stay in FriendFeed. I’ve not been plying too much time in FriendFeed, but it does seem to provide something close to a place to see the comments on your content in one place.

So while content is easily ingested into other sites by the elegantly simple format of RSS, there seems to be little in the way of structuring or feeding of comment data back to the source (yes, I know there are feeds for comments from a few places).

It just seems wrong to me that commentary on my content is not connected back to the source.

So I dream of an internet perhaps invented by Tony Hirst where all the data is structured, interchangable, and flows back and forth in smooth motions.

Until then, we have commentary/conversations/comments about media as detached orphans and likely need some Hirst-like hacks to coalesce them (how’s that for a request, Tony?).

Calendar data has always stumped me- on one hand it seems rather structured — something (data) happens on a date (data) maybe at a place (data) but it is something people much more savvy than I struggle with as it gets more complex… but I am not writing about the micro issues of micro data.

In the last few years of many travel trips, I’d dabbled with two web based calendar services, which at some level are very similar– both dopplr and trip.it allow you to add events without the manual typing in of things to form– very elegantly by forwarding via email your airline, car rental, hotel reservations — that is oh so smart. For a while I was using both, but ran into some issues with dopplr accepting a second email sender address (I get travel stuff sent to both my work and personal email).

Both offer maps, itineraries, social connections, blog widgets… Here is my travel on tripit and on dopplr. Tripit has a very slick iPhone app (dopplr is offering one soon). dopplr has a great carbon counter. TripIt’s iPhone app rocks and I have it integrated with a FlightTracker app. doppr has a new sort of collective intelligence thing going with its Social Atlas…. oi, it gets tiring to track.

I cant really say one is “better” than the other because the features are constantly changing, and I don’t really see a need to try and analyze the features; so in the past year, I have been sending all my travel to TripIt alone. It works, but I got some feed notes about dopplr starting some new things and wondered if there was some duct tape and rss way to connect them all together.

I ended up mapping my calendar cloud using gliffy.

My calender cores are Google calendars, shared between my NMC google account and my personal CogDogBlog Google account. I synchronize them to my desktop iCal using SpanningSync (yes there are ways to do this directly with iCal, but what I have works). I have my iCal subscribed to my feed from TripIt, so all of my TripIt data is pushed to iCal and then to Google. And I get everything synced to my iPhone via iTunes.

What I was curious was if there was a way to push my Trip data to dopplr… and sort of found it. Since my TripIt comes into my iCal via a feed, all I had to do is to publish it to dopplr as instructed. It does work, although it seems to be parsing my travel oddly… Since I live in Strawberry Arizona and drive to Pheonix for air travel, dopplr has me listed with a trip “flying to Phoenix”. And for some reason, a tripIt booked hotel in Austin, with full location information, ends up in dopplr in Colorado Springs (I am guessing because the hotel address is on Barton Springs Rd?).

It’s not perfect, but I love building these patchwork spaghetti networks of data. Why? Because I can….

BlogSieve is a web-based tool that creates new feeds by filtering, merging and sorting existing feeds. The BlogSieve engine accepts virtually every (valid) feed format, processed results are then exported into any feed format you choose

You can enter up to 5 feed sources (RSS URLs) as a starting point. The feature that Blogsieve offers that may maje it stand out from others, is that you can create a series of “filters” or search terms, so you are not getting everything from all 5 sources, but ones that match keyword criteria. It also provides output in 4 flavors of RSS.

As a quick example, I grabbed the URLs from 4 of my Canadian blog authors I read, mixed it with my own, to create the “Four and a Half Canadians” feed: http://feeds.blogsieve.com/5/RSS2.0. The service is new (I had bad luck with my first test of filters, maybe a bad choice), and what it really lacks is a way to go back and make modifications in the settings (like when my sample feed above I forgot to select a category, so we are labeled as “Art”…). It could also stand to append the feed channels in the item titles so you know where it came from.

If you read this full entry, I ran my new BlogSieved feed through Feed2JS to show the output

So here is a roadmap of a change I set up in about 30 minutes time to rescue some stale links. This approach is something teachers can easily do to populate their own web sites with new web resources for their students, and can be done so efficiently, and without much effort. It fits in to an instructors own discovery process of resources, and boils down to:

(1) Find interesting sites
(2) Bookmark (using browser tool link) to del.icio.us
(3) Tag it with a special identifier
(4) Create a cut and paste Feed to Javascript code
(5) Past to Web page(s)

By repeating 1+2, the pages in (5) are auto updated. It is no great Einsteinian leap, but cannot imagine where there is not a goldrush stampede of faculty using this approach.

So back to my situation. Our web site for the Ocotillo Online Learning Group has pretty much a stock template for all of the internally linked pages in that site. When I set it up, I did so in a manner so that a box of content on the left side navigation bar representing a collection of new web resources, was generated from a single external text file. Without getting too techie, the PHP technology we use for all of our web pages allows me to create a place in all documents that says, “Take all the contents of this external file, and stick it right here”.

The benefit of a PHP include is if I update the little text file, all changes that reference it are updated.

So my original plan was every now and then I would manually update this file, and there would be a “see more” link to a larger set of web site links. The pitfall to this approach is I either get lazy, or run out of time to keep doing all this manual editing. Thus, the links that were listed as “new” were pretty much 2 years old.

So I had a brief flash of light. Or maybe it was just an extra jolt of coffee.

I already do a lot of site bookmarking on my collection of my del.icio.us bookmarks. I could just start tagging stuff I wanted on my OLG site with a tag of… olg in addition to other tags L might add like “teaching”, “code”, “ajax”, “technology”, “socialtech”, etc… in my normal review of web sites, and extra click using the del.icio.us bookmark tool files sites into a special OLG category.

Now a link to this collection is a start, but we can do more. If I copy the RSS feed URL for this tag collection, and then take it over to Feed2JS, I can build a cut an paste JavaScript line of “code” that will generate a simple list of say the ten most recent marked sites.

Just by putting this JavaScript code created by Feed2JS
:

<script language="JavaScript" 
    src="http://feed2js.org/feed2js.php?
    src=http%3A%2F%2Fdel.icio.us%2Frss%2Fcogdog%2Folg&num=10
    &targ=y&css=olg" type="text/javascript">
</script>

<noscript>
<a href="http://feed2js.org/feed2js.php?
src=http%3A%2F%2Fdel.icio.us%2Frss%2Fcogdog%2Folg&num=10&targ=y
&css=olg&html=y">View RSS feed</a>
</noscript>

into a text file named new.inc I can have the dynamic feed of new sites inserted into my web pages (the formatting is controlled by some extra CSS styles, but that is not essential. In all the pages I want this on the sidebar, all I need to have in my HTML code is:

<?php include 'new.inc'?>

I also add to my new.inc file an extra link for “more resources” page that goes to another new page that now uses the same construct, but displays the most recent 20 bookmarked sites, and includes the item descriptions.

Now if all of this sounds complicated, it’s only because I’ve tried to over explain. but think about this- once set up, you can use the Feed2JS code on any number of web pages, be they PHP, ASP, CFM, HTML, home page, Blogger template, Blackbaord/WebCT site… And if you set up tags for say your different classes you are teaching, as you find new resource sites relevant to these classes, you can tag appropriately, and the most recent items will be automatically published to your different course web pages.

It is simple, and elegant, or at least I think so. Being able to update numerous web sites via the basic act of bookmarking and tagging in a collection, and having different subsets of content being “pushed” out as new content to other web sites… well it is just sweet music to me.