learnandteachonline.com

Howard Owens talks (among other things) about the value of trying small seat-of-the-pants ideas that can move a media property forward. Yes.

Insistence on applying metrics stops these little efforts, Owen says. I think there's also a print mindset that likes things always finished, which is antithetical to the mind of the online tinkerer, who perpetually works in draft, and likes it that way.

Print editor: Is it done?

Online editor: No, it's never done. Isn't that great?

Print editor: I hate that part. How can you stand it?

Online editor: Well, the downsides are balanced by all kinds of joys. The least of them: can you snatch back your magazine out of the reader's inbox?

Concreteness and product and sure bets versus flux and process and experimentation.

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.

I was so happy to see all the developers popping up with ideas in answer to Dave Winer's advice request for the best way to go about porting the OPML Editor to Linux. Great idea to approach it that way, and get a fresh crop of techies thinking about it. The open-source Frontier crowd doesn't seem to be doing much at all anymore.

God knows I don't work at that level, and barely even understand what's needed or what the aim is, but I know I'd love to see the Linux build so the OPML Editor Community Server can run on it. That makes all kinds of sense.

But who knows, maybe Dave is thinking more along the lines of fractional horsepower servers. That's cool, too, and even more groundbreaking.

Hell yeah, I'd put a teensy web server in my little Sansa mp3 player to sync podcasts with my home network. Put one in my cat's collar or on the bottom of my shampoo bottle. Or, how about this? In a bookmark in my paper book that tells me where I left off so I can continue in audio when I get in the car?

Maybe this widget has been around for a while but I only noticed it today at the bottom of a story about disputed war casualty counts. (You may have to log in to WaPo.) Made in Flash and served on the Clearspring widget platform. I'll check out Clearspring.

I've been writing some fiction on my OPML blog, an experiment using paid posts as product placements within the story. (Except after doing it for a few days, my enthusiasm about the paid post aspect is waning.)

I'll be archiving the story here, using the Drupal book module.

If I published a draft of my two-thirds-finished novel with a service like Lulu and ordered a copy for myself, I wonder if it would inspire me to finish it?

I had not gone looking for these demand services in a number of years. I notice CafePress doesn't do it anymore. When did that happen and why, I wonder.

An ad on the paidContent.org site might indicate that Web 2.0 design principles are creeping into advertisements. I popped over there from my aggregator to see if there was more on the Lucent story. Yes, but alas, no. There's only a link to a subscribers-only Wall Street Journal article. Lucent's an important employer in Naperville, my town. Or it was. It's sad to see the empty parking lots around those big buildings.

See straw poll results on opinions about Origam on TeleRead, a eBook blog, which, since an MS product manager showed up over there, has been Origami central -- in a more 2-way way than Engadget.

Jeff Jarvis is calling for blog template reform. He wants to see categories in sections like a newspaper and all that sort of thing.

I have a field day with Expression Engine, the CMS I use at work, which has the most flexible and complex templating systems I've ever worked with. Infinite hierarchical categories too!

One example:

Check out the bigger screenshots of one blog that's sent in full as a weekly HTML email newsletter. Plus, headlines are displayed with links in a member area, and on the public site you get heads with no links. All the same copy. (The council is supported mostly by company and organization memberships so a lot of web content is just for members.)

In another mindbending case we do nine newsletters for special interest groups. The readers don't know it, but it's all one blog with nine categories. Each category has its own template complete with nameplate and rendered as a separate newsletter.

I have feed and search tricks in mind and wish I had the time to do them all.

[Jarvis piece discovered by way of Scripting News, my third aggregator. ;-) ]

Print publishers can't really use the word "subscribe" to refer to RSS subscriptions, can they?

What's the solution? Not syndicate. I hate that because it's not the reader who is doing the syndicating.