Just like I have done previously with Intense Debate, I have disabled the built in comments for this entry and added comments powered by typepad connect. You can also check out my typepad connect profile page.

I'm just curious to get some sense of what this service has to offer. Please post a comment below and let me know what you think.

As an experiment, I have turned off the built-in comments for this post, and turned on comments powered by intensedebate.com.

Some features of intense debate:

• post video comments (try it out, it's very easy)
• view your or another's intense debate profile to see comments you have left across the web
• comment voting
• easily embed youtube video
• easily embed polls
• threaded comments
• commenter profiles that include info such as last tweet, and links to other social sites.
• login with openid
• login with facebook connect

So, go ahead and comment below. Post some video comments. Vote some comments up and down. It's fun and easy!

Blog comments: Do we need a standard for some sort of blog entry object, where comments, and comment submission form can travel and be included in the recontextualization that happens with blog entries via RSS. For example, if I am running some sort of social hub for a class, and students' blog posts are flowing in to this space, wouldn't it be nice if the comments left on an entry at the aggregated space are in sync with the comments on the source blog. What if a blog provided a comment engine that acted in the more flexible manner of comment engines like disqus or facebook connect . The comments functionality could be embedded with the same post in any context. What if the the entry body that is included in the syndication feed also included the comments and the form? is that all we need to do?

Pick between two networks:

Network 1: Users can perform a set of white listed functions. Only certain respectable entities can distribute information: a few universities, some newspapers, governments. Dumb terminals. functioning happens in the network center.

Network 2: Distributed, dumb network. Intelligence at the ends. We don't know what stuff is traveling on the network (text, sounds, video, maps).

network 2 will lead to porn, spam, idiots, ranting, stupid rumors, piracy. Anyone can connect to this. Whose gonna do commerce on this thing?

No one would have voted for network 2 in 1992.

Two models for encyclopedia to have information on anything and become an authoritative source:

Encyclopedia 1: Need best experts. going to have to be paid a lot. need peer reviewers. edit for style and consistency. enormous investment. strong copyrights to protect this investment. trademarks for logo to say this is the authoritative source.

encyclopedia 2: we'll create a site and people can put stuff up.

The difference between these two models relates to property rights, corporate organization.

Two software models:

Software model 1: machine code, drm, sold through license. Software model 2: open source.

Both worked. IBM makes twice from open source, than from paid portfolio.

West point:if you want a secure system you need an open system. Anyone is smart enough to come up with an algorithm that they can't break.

No one would think this 17 years ago. We are always wrong in one direction. In each time, the open version appeared that it was not going to work.

not claiming that open is always better. Sometimes we need closed systems for privacy or property rights.

There are reasons to believe that cognitively we skew to see more dangers and few benefits of open systems, and skew to see more benefits and less dangers of closed systems. This is the cultural agoraphobia.

behavioral economics: people don't think the way economists think that we think. We buy warranties even though they are not a good deal.

We are not risk neutral, we are strong risk adverse, the risk makes us feel disproportionate regret.

As a teacher you took methods, tricks, exam formats of other teachers and made them your own.

open materials aren't just free to copy, but are free to adapt, version, customize, just as with open source software.

We have flourishing open software, open encyclopedia, open network, but education is behind.

Academic presses: Tons of stuff. You can't buy book anymore. So clearly they are all available online? The daily show puts their stuff online for free. .

Empirical evidence that having books online for free drives sells up

In academia we have a blindness towards openness.

openness can cure openness: google pagerank. follow whre animals go to the water to find waterhole.

we (the audience) make decisions: Your instinct will be to clamp down on the side of control.

Other people will think of better stuff to do with our materials than we can. There are billion people wired out there.

Higher Education is being more timid than viacom. yes, there are risks. But there are concerns about losing audiences. With every type of literacy, there is point where there are conerns about opening up the franchise. Letting women vote, large scale reading of the bible in your native language, scribal conventioans that made it very hard to write, deliberately difficult - not a bug but a feature. lawyers: we have our own language. you need to pay us to speak it for you. "Law French"

design principles: default should be open. if not, burden of proof is on person seeking closed solution. Some items, like students social security numbers, will be easy to meet. Others like ed resources, will not be as easy.

Tech systems: make them open so users can modify with their behavior. Huge repositories with tons of meta data, costs millions of dollars. No one uses them. Not designed where user behavior modifies the system. (like google).

In pilot training you are trained not to trust your perceptions. We need to learn to distrust our cultral agoraphobia.

I started by thinking how cool it would be if any time anyone posted anything at blogs@psu with the psuets tag, it could show up on the ETS twitter account. Same thing for posts tagged with tltsym09 and the TLT symposium twitter stream.

So, I figured I might as well try out this little tool before I get too far ahead of myself thinking of the opportunities. I hooked up this blog's feed to my twitter account.

It worked. Okay, so let's hook up my link blog, too.

Now I was hooked. I just posted content over at the blogs@psu news. Why not hook that up to my twitter account also?

Then the bell really went off. Ding! Why not hook up the comments feed of my blog up to my twitter account? I configured twitterfeed to only send the most recent new comment, checking every 30 minutes. So at most, one comment tweet will be sent every thirty minutes. This blog doesn't get that many comments, so in reality there will be far fewer tweets going out. Although with new comments being fed to twitter, that may very well change.

I have known for a while that one of the most important new features needed on blogs@psu is "email me followup comments" feature when leaving a comment on someone else's blog. Without this, conversations on a particular blog post can easily whither. Well, in the meantime this twitterfeed can help remedy that. maybe. We'll see.

One cavet to twitterfeed: you have to let it know your twitter password. It's really the only way something like this can work. I threw caution to the wind. You may not be as free-spirited. Update: As I was writing this, twitter launched it's oauth support, a more secure way to authorize api access.

Along the lines of Jamie Oberdick's comment, what surprised me about this search page is that I have found myself using it for searching all these social sites at once. Getting the local (PSU) content mashed in with that is such an added bonus. I'm simultaneously getting the local and global results. I am curious to see where this path will lead us.

You can find our slides below. I am happy that these slides just served as a jumping off point for a conversation with everyone in the room.

On Wednesday, I modified the blog search template to include these ideas

On Friday, it went into production. Check out the page on "democracy".

It was really easy to make this change. The point of this post is not to toot my horn in how quickly this idea was realized. The point is to highlight another example of the benefits of a platform we can easily build on to realize our ideas. All the details on this new page, and my ideas on where this is all might be going will have to wait for another time.

This is why I met Chris Millet's blog post today with such joy. He used MT's custom field feature to add a location field for the entries and modified the templates to generate a GeoRSS feed and embed a maps widget from yahoo. Check out his post. It is really cool.

What MT/blogs@psu needs to provide is a way for developers to easily package and share these features. I know they could become template sets, but I am thinking something more flexible: 1) Something that I don't need to install on the server and could continued to be maintained by the author (kind of like the way styles can be shared via stylecatcher) and 2) something that could be mix-and-matched. For example, I might want to add maps support to either a "classic blog" or a "professional website".

The future is now, my friends.

Oh no! embedding is disabled on the last video I wanted to embed. you'll have to click below to watch the last video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D6iEe_1kWqA

This film is a great milestone in the evolution of grassroots video from the chemical (film) to the analog (video tape) to the digital. Just the fact that is such a cult classic says something about the time it was made. Footage like this was scarce. The genius was in pointing the camera. The movie's bootleg distribution of a copy of a copy of VHS tapes functions as an analog precursor to the large scale democratizing of video enabled by the internet.

Question: has youtube made people more savvy about being in front of a camera so that they are better are shaping their presence, and as such, would not act quite as dopey on film as the denizens of the heavy metal parking lot?

Overthinking this little filmic gem is kind of making me feel dirty.

and which
you were probably
using
to paste from Word

forgive me
markdown is easy
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To sum up: as of 2/24/2009, we have 10,097 blogs, 39,717 entries, and 16,002 pages.

Big numbers. But what do they mean?

There has been a huge increase in the amount of pages. I might attribute this to the English 202 blog pilot, which mostly asks students create pages, as well as the increased use of blogs@psu as a general web publishing tool and portfolio tool. Really this is a sign of the growth of popularity of the professional template set. Every time a professional template set blog is created, three pages are created by default. This semester you see the amount of pages shoot up in a way it did not do this past fall semester (The first semester the pro template set was available). Seems like this template set might have caught on in a way it did not last semester.

Some digging directly with the DB might come up with some more interesting details.

Now twitter is in the process of reshaping how people communicate electronically. It is a service that is the basis of a revolution of instant notifications.

Really, all we need to do is perhaps reshape and redirect the way the text flows on a page, and we have a new pattern of interaction. Possibly the next step in an evolution or revolution of communication.

All this is to say to myself: Keep iterating on the communication services (e.g. blogs@psu) that I am working on. Keep offering different configurations of how pages are published. As we get more and more of the basic structure of the service settled, we can move to supporting more varied patterns of interaction.

I have fallen off the blog-a-day wagon horribly this month. I won't make excuses, but I will keep blogging as much as I can for as long as it makes sense to do so, possibly, in one form or another, for the rest of my life.

The blog a day is a forced creativity exercise that will hone writing skills and also serve as a record, a way to remember the events of your life and to possibly realize what is truly important. Even if one keeps a professional blog, the blog could be a professional journey of discovery.

However, I may have to start getting more personal in my blogging if I am going to keep this running. Do I use this PSU blog that is aggregated into various staff intranets to do this? I don't know if I can stand to have two blogs.

All this is just to say that my appreciation of blogging practice has increased 1 level over the last two weeks.