Jonesieblog

Robert Anton Wilson died on 11/1/2007, as reported on his official blog. R U Sirius has written an obituary.

RAW was incredibly important to me in the early ’90s, when I devoured The Illuminatus! Trilogy, Cosmic Trigger, Prometheus Rising and many more of his fine books.

Robert Anton Wilson saw the Universe as a great big hilarious mystery, wide-open with possibilities. He dismissed all purveyors of certainty, and explained in clear, simple language the extent to which we all live in our own self-constructed models of reality rather than actually receiving reality as it is moment to moment.

In hindsight, RAW led me to Buddhism. I was going to say “led me to becoming a Buddhist” but RAW would have ridiculed the use of such a lazy, meaningless label. In fact, I have never really been very comfortable with the label “Buddhist”. It is not used in the East, where people describe themselves as followers of the Buddha’s path rather than as Buddhists. As a small gesture of respect to the great man I’ll refrain from describing myself as a Buddhist in future. Hail Eris!

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In Business on Radio 4 dedicated a programme to Open Source software.  For those of you out there who are all about startups,  VC and the buzz of business, it gives a great explanation of the Open Source business model and why it is going to beat the proprietary software model in the long term.

For those of you that can’t be bothered to listen, the bottom line is that the Open Source business model sees profit as coming from services and support arrangements around software rather than from charging for the software itself.  Give the software away free (as in beer and as in speech) then offer the users the opportunity to purchase support from you.  You won’t make so much money per user, but you’ll get a lot more users.  It works!

Thanks to Steve Lee for the heads-up on this one.

Stumble it!

The Scotedublogs wiki has become the de facto place to find Scottish edubloggers or to announce your own blog’s arrival on the scene. It has done a great job, but is beginning to outgrow its current wiki format.

One key reason why our blogging community has flourished where so many previous attempts to develop an on-line community of teachers have failed is this: we built and continue to build the community ourselves.

I am therefore delighted to be able to say that we are continuing this tradition by building our own exciting new hub for our community: I am working with Peter, John and others from the Scottish edublogging community to produce www.scotedublogs.org.uk

This site already provides the following:

• A directory of Scottish edublogs, viewable by authority or by tags
• The facility to add new blogs
• Colour-coding of blogs based on recency of last post (red=hot!)
• A quick view of recent posts for each blog
• The facility to add tags to blogs
• The facility to export an OPML file of any of the lists of blogs you view – this file can be imported into a feed reader so that you instantly add all the chosen blogs to your reader.
• An overall view of what’s new via a dynamically updated list of the latest posts from any of the blogs in the system.

In the very near future you will be able to add blogs and [it does this now] create your own custom feeds in the site for use in your feed reader. For example, you could create a feed of all the posts from maths blogs, or the feeds from all Glasgow pupil blogs.

The site will also produce statistics to analyse what the community is talking about, how much we are talking and how often we are posting.

The current site is still very “beta”, but is already providing a useful resource. More importantly, it is demonstrating the power of the Open Source development model by utilizing the combined talents of many members of our community to produce a tool that will help the community to flourish and grow.

If you would like to help with this project, please join the discussion group. The development process is completely open, and we are keen to get input from as many members of the community as possible. Check out the site, and let us know what impresses you, what you would change and how you can help.

If you would like to see the code that makes it all happen, you can visit the repository. In fact, if you so desired you could grab a copy of the code, set up your own version of scotedublogs and change it to suit yourself. This is what Open Source means – it’s much, much more than just being zero-cost, or sharing your data via feeds.

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Blogs exist in communities. For example, in my community – Scottish education – there are probably around 500 blogs. Each blog will be publishing new posts at varying frequencies. Some will post almost every day, whilst others may only post once a fortnight or have fallen into disuse altogether. If you are a blogger in such a community, how on Earth are you supposed to keep on top of the new posts in all these blogs? 500 favorites that you visit every day? Impossible!

Feeds and feed readers are the answer. Feeds turn the whole problem on its head by, in effect, making all these blogs tell your feed reader when they post something. You only have to visit your feed reader – such as Bloglines – where you can see at a glance which of your chosen blogs have published new posts. It’s like having a personal shopper that goes around all your favorite shops and tells you when interesting new stuff appears on the shelves. With these tools at your disposal, it becomes feasible to monitor hundreds of blogs and still have something resembling a life!

Read this RSS Guide from weblogg-ed for more details!

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