RSS

The JISC have refreshed their website, introducing RSS goodness and greatly increasing the ability to find information about programmes, projects and services, such as OSS Watch. Their RSS feed of funding opportunities is likely to be especially well subscribed.

Unfortunately the RSS is write only, and the new JISC website appears to make no use of the many quality feeds that their services produce.

I've got approaching thousand images on the flickr photo sharing website and have been considering whether I should continue my annual subscription or move to another service. This has led me to consider what features I really want or need enough to pay for, and from there to consider what features of flickr I current use:

1. I upload photos regularly (at least weekly)
2. I use flickr as my primary backup for images: if my computer harddisk dies, all the photos I care about are safe on flickr
3. I spend considerable time tagging my photos, both with tags which apply to entirely batches / sets and with tags which apply to individual photos
4. I use URLs of flickr photos (usually my own) in email or blogging
5. I license all of my uploaded photos under the Creative Commons (with a rare exception or two)
6. I participate minimally in several flickr-based communities, with a mind to building my photographic skills and experience.
7. I divide my photos religiously into sets, to make it easy to locate (and tag) photos, particularly travel photos
8. I use my flickr RSS feed in several places (and in several different RSS formats)
9. I publish almost all of my photos publicly. The only reason some of them are private is because once I see them on the larger screen they're dreadful shots, or because some people don't like their photos being public (two I encounter regularly) and I do my best to accommodate them.
10. Rarely I upload non-photographic images to flickr, but not enough to worry about recent issues

It is a little hard to know which features I might use without actually using a system that offered the features and seeing how they worked, but the features foremost in my mind currently are:

It seems to me a natural consequence of the increasing bridging of traditional data sources into RDF is that the number of "walled gardens" of RDF is increasing. Walled gardens are areas from which there is no escape, and while they certainly have their uses (in particular controlling who can access what), they erode the overall usefulness of the system as a whole, by meaning that you literally can't get to there from here.

Examples of RDF walled gardens include the FOAF generated by such systems as tribe.net and livejournal. While it is useful that these sites are exposing data in a machine readable web 2.0 format such as RDF/FOAF, the inability to link to people, resources and interests outside the walled garden represent a significant barrier to interoperability. I am the same person in my blog RSS feed, my flickr photo feed, my del.icio.us feed , my tribe FOAF and my hand-edited FOAF, but only the last can I link to the others, despite the fact that they are all in the same format.

I've recently encountered a couple of cool tools that can help make your site more interactive and current, on a budget, without driving your webmaster insane.

Want to share a reading list with your audience, such as guides for classroom instruction, podcasting, etc.? LibraryThing is yet another social computing tool that lets you catalog books (ones you own or ones you want) online, organize them with tags, and share your reactions with others. It's incredibly easy to add books -- I had been using Amazon's wish list function to keep track of books on my wish list, and LibraryThing imports these! They also have a "bookmarklet" that lets you add any book you find on Amazon to your library list with one click.

Even cooler, they have a "widget" that you can put on any web site featuring random or selected books -- see an example on my

Like me, some of you might have participated in a great "webinar" put on by the Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE) this past Thursday.

Public Relations representatives from a number of different colleges and universities viewed the presentation of a WebEx session.  Even though I knew much of the subject area (Blogs, RSS, Podcasts and Wikis), I found it extremely useful to see how other higher ed entities are using these new technologies.

We had several of our PR reps from McCombs in attendance and we had an interesting discussion after the seminar.  We had a few people wanting to jump in with both feet and we had others who wanted to wait and see.  We're already doing some limited blogging and limited RSS.  I think we could probably use wikis internally, I'm not sure we would use them for the general public; I guess I would have to see some more ideas. 

Podcasting has been somewhat controversial here.   While some faculty are comfortable with the idea of recording their lectures to be disseminated via a podcast, there are many others who don't like the idea.  "If you podcast, students won't come to class," they argue.  Others don't want to give the clearance to use their material because it's copyrighted.  It will take some time, but I think podcasting will come around.  

In this 20 minute interview, we'll hear from Brian Lamb, Project Coordinator at the University of British Columbia as he shares thoughts on blogs, podcasts, wikis, aggRSSive, and the potential for Creative Commons in academia.   Brian's weblog is available at Abject Learning.