learnandteachonline.com

Dave's been refining his experimental Flickr 2 Twitter app.

The picture part is a new wrinkle in TwitterGrams, a way to send an audio tweet -- by uploading an MP3 file, or much more easily by phoning it in using a gateway enabled by BlogTalk Radio.
It would be nice if the picstream had a little player like Blogger's Blogger Play.

I did make a no-Flash player for the audio TwitterGrams. I'm not sure I'd know where to start with a slide player (but might think on it! ;-) )

Don't mean to pick on the Bill Moyers Journal site. I've seen other traditional media get podcasting lingo wrong too. I wonder if they know it makes them look, like, not with it when they're trying so hard to get with it.

YOU DON'T "SIGN UP" FOR PODCASTS AND RSS FEEDS. You just get them. Sorry, didn't mean to yell. I know you're trying. It's hard to get really mad at public broadcasting. Heart in the right place sort of thing.

Must be a holdover from standard language about signing up for email newsletters. Or maybe they're afraid people will be afraid of the word "subscribe."

While reminding myself this afternoon how Moodle's glossary module works I noticed it has its own RSS feed. It could be the feed is mainly intended so instructors can be notified when a student submits a new term. But it struck me it could also be output in a different way to make a little word-of-the-day widget.

I'm messing around with the glossary with an eye toward putting some textbook glossaries online for work, and possibly trying to make it work as an English-Spanish safety dictionary.

Jon Udell's latest interview on IT Conversations gets into Syndicated Oriented Architecture (SynOA, to distinguish it from plain ol' SOA).

Here's the .mp3 file of the talk with Rohit Khare, founder of KnowNow and software architect.

The first step, both evangelists say, is you gotta "RSSify" everything. Then tag your information to help other people find what you've found. Consider special problems of syndication in the enterprise.

My note: think beyond blogs when you think about RSS.

NorthxEast's 50 most influential bloggers list is pretty good. Except the order seems kind of screwy, and Dave Winer should be on it. No matter what you might say about who did what first, blogging would not be as popular as it is today if he hadn't been helping to make it so for years by leading by example and making tools and making people think.

Speaking of Dave, I'd like to see listings like this offer an OPML file as a subscription list to the feeds of the sites they're featuring.

Ever since I read the thread on the Moodle forums about integration with Facebook, I've been thinking how the two species just don't want to meet in the wild.

But what about something like this? Build a Facebook app that's a simple output of an assignments feed from a learning management system. Give it a name like "Here's what I'm supposed to be doing; tell me to get back to work."

I think most kids -- heck, most humans -- like the idea of a nudge if they've asked for it. Think of diet groups or the dissertation support group I started 10 years ago, run for years now, and more ably, by Tom Tom Jankowski (PhinisheD). That kind of help can be quite motivating.

A couple of weeks ago I remarked on some conversation around the net about the trend toward reading blog posts only in aggregators, with readers never visiting the website. I said it's like they are coming to a meeting in a bare little interrogation room instead of sitting in my living room in the best chair and sipping a cup of tea.

I was wondering how it would work to style blog posts so some of the feeling of your blog design would be injected into aggregators. Then yesterday I tried it on my OPML blog.

Here's how such a post from my OPML blog looks in the oPML Editor's built-in NewsRiver aggregator

If one wanted to do this for real, lots more fussing would have to happen. Some of the things include:

- Fiddling with the styles to see that they render in the major HTML aggregators. For example I've done something with the example that Bloglines doesn't like.

- You'd want to redesign your blog so any graphic element would be more subtle than my ice cream cone. It looks cool once on a page, but a reader would get sick of it repeated for every post when they are reading the blog. With some blogging tools you could have an alternate template so the aggregated posts could look different from those appearing on the blog's web page. Or you could probably do it on OPML Editor blogs and other blogs by modifying the script that generates the feed.

- You would have to put the styles into your blog template because you wouldn't want to go through this for each post:

Some readers might not like it if bloggers started doing this, because maybe they like having all posts look equal and neutral with none trying to attract attention. I'm surprised that people who make commercial blogs haven't thought of it, at least none that I read is doing it.

(Pssssst! Don't tell them.)

MSDN TV video about Simple Sharing Extensions. 15 minutes.

Thanks, Alex.

Adam Green's Top 10 list at Top 10 is all OPML blogs.

Maybe I'm the token woman, or maybe I occasionally have something to say. In any event, thanks Adam.

If you want to get steeped in OPML, you should grab the OPML reading list for these blogs. Read them for just a week or two if you want, and you'll get a good idea of what's going on.

Remember a while back when Microsoft first announced support for RSS and we found out they weren't going to call it RSS because the acronym isn't descriptive enough? I told a business story about names as an example of how whatever you call a thing eventually comes around to equate to the thing it names.

The idea intruded into my thoughts again this morning when I spotted a box in my bedroom labeled "floppies." That box hasn't held floppy disks since... well, since you didn't keep boxes of floppies anymore. It has contained sewing junk for years now, but when I see the word floppies scribbled on that box I think, "Oh, that's where my pincushion is." It's about associations, I guess, isn't it? Either on a personal or group level.