Slowly fun. The concept of my being a supreme editor-in-chief is wonderful! This is how I feel each time I open the wordly JRNL at Skate of the web, a “journal” where I publish, automagically, the best posts from the great bloggers I admire and read. The best thing is that it is all fully automated! I select the feeds and have them go through FeedRaider to aggregate them into one big meta-feed, which FeedRaider then pushes to my WP page. RSS feeds do propagate on their own, and their authors do not really know what’s happening with them! (Wow, what did I say???) Actually, a bit of creativecommons license helps… But it actually happens like this: posts tend to lose their parents early, but still, autorship is recognized.
Now, this technology has a great potential for schools and colleges. It is called mashup, and it will be playing an important role in education. Think of automated collections of students’ or faculty’s writings, or a way to let the news circulate through campus. Classes at different colleges are aware of each other thanks to meta-publishing and RSS. Tools are emerging for mashup. While it is very simple to create a simple RSS mashup like the example I described above, it may be a bit more complicated to design a new Web service by means of the public interfaces (so-called API’s) of other services. Google has a beta-level mashup editor, and Yahoo published a service called Pipes to graphically get, manipulate, filter and combine content from different sources.
Now, I’ve got another assignment. I want to republish a post form say, this blog, to another, without copying it by hand. I don’t want a mirror either: I need to be selective. Any suggestion?
Meanwhile, visit JRNL :-)!
