Watch this screencast from Brian Lamb: (original link)
Pretty cool. What we are basically talking about here is a decentralized model for writing content in one's environment of choice, then allowing that content to be dynamically republished in many places. For example, you could author a piece of course content in your blog, then have that content show up in the various course sections in your LMS. Better yet, a group of people could author content in wiki, then have the content appear in various other "static" contexts on the web. Update the wiki page, all the other content gets updated too. The screencast does a better job of explaining it than I can do right now.
After watching the video, I whipped up some mt templates to do the same thing. Look in the little "metadata bar" under the titles of my entries. An embed code for every blog entry.
While you are at it, check out the sidebar of this blog. An embed code for the headlines of the blog. Instructions on how you can add this to your blog are forthcoming.
I need to add this to blog pages as well.
Update: Thanks to a comment from Brian, I fixed the embed link. It wasn't working right in firefox.
Sweet! So how does this differ from the feed2js solution we were so hoped up on last year? We are all going to have to embrace a serious open ethos to make this work ... I love to see it!
The headline embed code in my sidebar is the exact same thing from this post.
This doesn't require any other service. Just built in to the blog.
Its so simple and yet so obvious! Brilliant.
On a practical level, we were just talking about effectively republishing content for the EGC yesterday and this could most certainly help.
From a much broader perspective, I think Cole hit it dead on. This could mean a big change in the way we think about content sharing, but I have a feeling it will take people a little while to come around to (or even understand) the idea and its benefits.
Thanks for sharing!
One might be surprised to learn that almost all YouTube videos can be easily embedded into almost any site with a few clicks.
There is also a world of possibilities that exist regarding the embedding of RSS feeds into web pages as html or javascript, with popular services like Feedburner now offering third-party services that covert feeds into embeddable content for any web page.
How could I add this to my blog? Excited about the possibilities this would create for my Fall class!
How could I add this to my blog? Excited about the possibilities this would create for my Fall class!