mtl3p

I played around on tagzania for a bit. I don’t really think I got the hang of map-annotating, because there’s no way I would want to associate with the “me” that’s reflected there. So far I think I come across as some kind of geeky homeless freak.

Hmm . . .

On second thought, that’s pretty impressive.

;-)

word of the day. or phrase of the day.

“application bleed”

-It’s as good a term as “mashup” at least. It’s what happens when you get Wifidog to work with Flickr, to work with GoogleMaps, to work with Delicious to work with iTunes.

I saw the phrase used here in Jo’s notes of a high-level community wifi meetup.

At the very least, it now has an rss feed. Feedback on best tags (+ bilingual tags) would be good.

It’s explained on a new page on the wiki.

I’m really tired and aren’t thinking too straight, but should we do the same thing with yulblog? 1) we would know when someone joined and be able to check them out, and 2) different tags / categories could be cool. English, Francais, Photo, cooking, webdesigner, etc. Not descriptions, - categories.

Maybe it’s just too much to expect people to put their time into. I know people (sylvain? patrick? boris?) have been playing around with tags. Is this old hat?

Quite literally since I want to make a business out of helping academics use web-publishing tools.

Ed Bilodeau comments on the very common problem of academics not having enough time for blogging. We’ve all heard it for, but I think that the article he links to as well as his brief response formulates the problem well.

I’m involved in helping 3 research groups with their on-line tools. Each one is very different in terms of it’s needs/abilities/circumstances/resources, but the problem of time is always present.

But there is this nagging sense that this answer is too “pat”. Something keeps directing me to wonder if this question of “not enough time” is a common-sense answer that we are using because the real issue is more problematic? (not trying to be coy, I really don’t have any suggestions towards an answer).

I recently decided that the titles of my entries suck. For example. I think I’ll just go with it.

Congrats to Richard, Daniel, and Nico for the “First Blog Project at the University of QuÈbec“. (I don’t really know who to congratulate, but it looks like they’re all pretty interested in it. So am I (and slightly jealous -it sounds fun).

Okay, so that went well :-) There are 20 entries, but more interestingly than that it was picked up by two people and at least 5 people added or changed their info on the wiki page without me contacting them.

Hmm. Maybe we’re on to something here.

I forgot to mention in the last post why I’m doing this. I’m very curious about the tension between publication and blogging for post-grad students. I wonder about the possibilities for collaborative learning for undergrads and grads. I would love to discuss more whether blogging is a destabilizing force in the strict hierachy of academia. And mainly it really pisses me off that I don’t know other people *right in montreal* that are into the same stuff as me (that’s the reason I started IleSansFil - because I wanted friends that were into opensource and activism). I am amazed at the lack of social networking that exists inter- and even intra-universities in the same city. The first step towards any of us working together, having a discussion, or supporting each other is getting to know each other.

Nico said that he would help me, so the first step we have to take is cleaning up the page, making it bilingual, and trying to track down some more university bloggers. I know that there are a ton of them that aren’t currently blogging about their subject, but maybe they would if there was audience and a way to receive feedback.

I asked Seb some questions about how to display / share academic’s relevant posts (ie: not the entries where they talk about their girlfriends/boyfriends/pets). He suggested either building build a group feed out of everyone’s RSS feeds (too much info) or using topicexchange (too little info because we’re all too lazy/forgetfull to manually enter trackback pings for each relevant post.

So then I went back and bugged him about rss feeds for categories and / or automating trackback pings for certain categories. So if someone has a category called “work” or “sociology” I would want their blog to automatically ping the a certain topicexchange trackback url every time they post to that category. Or, I would want them to make an RSS feed available for that category and then splice them.

So what I have to find out now is how many of the blogging tools have these capabilities. MT does both of them (link 1, 2).
Wordpress can do the trackback thing.

However, most people don’t use MT or WP (well, looking over the list most people do host their own. However there are lots of blogspots).We would need blogger and livejournal to support this. Well, maybe not livejournal ;p

. . . . researching blogspot . . . What a second, those poor fools over at blogspot don’t even *have* categories! What the freak are we going to do now? sigh.

I’m going to put my pea-sized (when it comes to web-devel) intellect to work on this. If any of you have ideas, or know more about blogspot please post.

I’m making a list of Montreal academics who blog.

If you know of anyone who is a undergrad, master’s, phd candidate, or prof that blogs please add them. They have to blog about their subject semi-regularly. So far there’s 13 of us. My bet is that there are a lot more, but that they aren’t part of the yulblog scene.

If you don’t know how to use a wiki please email them to me.

I’m at a CRACIN conference in Ottawa (agenda). They didn’t have wireless so I went out to the corner big-box store and picked up a router. Now I have access to the backchannel (everything is being broadcast via a macromedia product called BREEZE courtesy of one of the community partners -located up in northern ontario). Right now I’m listening to a presentation from the gov. people.

They have it set up so that you go to a url and you see within it a chat window, a window for slide presentations, a kind of buddy list, etc. However, most of the time people use their own laptops for the presentation (disconnecting the one doing the videoconferencing/backchanneling), so the rest of the people ((those without laptops) can’t see the chat so the remote participants are silence.

I’ve downloaded and installed subethaedit but I don’t have anyone to invite yet. The only other Mac user is running the meeting.

UPDATE: Nico blogged about the conference. He seems to be an interesting guy and we’ve started cross-pollinating each other’s blogs a bunch.

I messed around with it a few months ago when I read Seb’s post on it.

Then a friend, innocently enough, suggested that his group use it to share communal bookmarks and I kinda blew up at him. That was because I was freaked out because I was worried about them sync-ing up all of their different tools that each group was using (a little wiki here, another there, a couple of blogs and now this?!). Then it popped up a few more times and here I am, at 11:30, learning that firefox has an about:configure page and trying to modify settings to use nutr.itio.us instead.

I’m also sending emails every 5 minutes to the very quiet (but very busy) Daniel with titles like “check this out”, “here’s another link”, and “why isn’t this working?”. He’s kind of like my very own CIO (he’s going to kill me for saying that).

Even tastier than delicious is a fun article.

And now I’m putting in different urls trying to find the del.icio.us pages of people I know. seb? no, bopuc, yes but it looks like he stopped using it a while ago, sebpaquet, yes! Holy crap!

Is there an easier way to find people’s delicious space?

And after 5 minutes surfing Seb’s delicious page I have decided to abort this entry and just direct you all to his category of linkblogging if you have any interest. I’ll be there for the next few days.

What I’m specifically going to be trying to find out is how can small groups (like gameCODE) use this. Feel free to urlslap me.

Thinking about it now. Would it be better to have a group logon (simple, but i doubt people would do it) and bookmark from their? Or maybe just have a custom (read: weird) tag that only your group would use. That way you could use multiple categories: one being “Your%Grou#p” and the other being “hardware” or “wifi”?

I am *so* going to include my delicious rss feed on the side of my blog.

Okay - two more links and then I’m heading home. Really.

Two very cool workshops for academics/profs on rss/delicious/trackback/etc at UBC and a high school in New Jersey?

How cool is that UBC group? Blogging being supported by a canadian university? Crazy.

Okay. g’night.

I killed my Friendster self two days ago. Not even a pang. Sorry,John. That probably dropped your # of friends from 103,457 to 78,283.