learnandteachonline.com

James Farmer, a clear thinker about online learning, works through how to sell the idea of blogging communities (complete with slides).

Much as I love message boards, I do think he's right -- blogs may be a better basis for internal organizational communication.

It seems like the OPML Community Server could be a perfect basis for a company intranet, using its blogs for information, its instant outlining for collaboration, and its NewsRiver aggregator for feed reading. In fact, it looks like its sister, Radio Userland's community Server, was pitched as an intranet solution.

As one of the commenters to James's post points out, the commenting piece is iffy. There are no comments yet in OPML blogs. Because I've been quite active in the beta user community that's grown up around the OPML editor, I've done a fair bit of conversing with other OPML bloggers via blog post. Sometimes it even happens in real time.

And I keep coming back to a scenario where comments from a group of blogs within a single community might be aggregated to form a sort of message board. This would actually be a pretty simple thing to do if comments were enabled and were available in RSS as a separate comment feed. You could then read the collective comments in a River of News-style aggregator, which displays posts across feeds in a chronological fashion.

So this brings us around full circle from the starting point of blogs versus message boards, in a completely harmonious and satisfying way, because aggregated comment feeds like this essentially become a message board -- read-only at this point, but with SSE added to the mix, you could reply.

JournURL is supposed to do something like this. I just haven't checked it out. Anybody know if it works the way I'm describing?