learnandteachonline.com

"Learning 2.0" is the 2nd highest-ranked Technorati search this morning. Huh!

NorthxEast's 50 most influential bloggers list is pretty good. Except the order seems kind of screwy, and Dave Winer should be on it. No matter what you might say about who did what first, blogging would not be as popular as it is today if he hadn't been helping to make it so for years by leading by example and making tools and making people think.

Speaking of Dave, I'd like to see listings like this offer an OPML file as a subscription list to the feeds of the sites they're featuring.

A day or two ago, I noticed Technorati added a bunch of referrers from web directories to my claimed blogs. The directories definitely are not blogs. Is this something new I wonder? Will Technorati discover any page having an RSS feed?

I don't know when this happened but the pricing structure for EE has changed.

You can get the core, which includes enough for a blog, for free.

The personal version price dropped to $99.

The commercial version increased to $249.

Jeff Jarvis is calling for blog template reform. He wants to see categories in sections like a newspaper and all that sort of thing.

I have a field day with Expression Engine, the CMS I use at work, which has the most flexible and complex templating systems I've ever worked with. Infinite hierarchical categories too!

One example:

Check out the bigger screenshots of one blog that's sent in full as a weekly HTML email newsletter. Plus, headlines are displayed with links in a member area, and on the public site you get heads with no links. All the same copy. (The council is supported mostly by company and organization memberships so a lot of web content is just for members.)

In another mindbending case we do nine newsletters for special interest groups. The readers don't know it, but it's all one blog with nine categories. Each category has its own template complete with nameplate and rendered as a separate newsletter.

I have feed and search tricks in mind and wish I had the time to do them all.

[Jarvis piece discovered by way of Scripting News, my third aggregator. ;-) ]

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?

I use Expression Engine at work, right? Tonight I had a browse through the forums looking for information on importing XML into the EE database. Nobody's successfully done it, or they're not saying. I found a couple of mentions of an indirect method -- first coaxing your data into Moveable Type import format, and pointers to this wiki page.

Go take a look at that wiki page. You have instructions for converting Textpattern blog content to MT so it can go into EE. When you step back and look at the interoperability landscape there, isn't it just ridiculous?

Maybe OPML could play a role in this.

I wonder if Amy G has checked this out. I'm going to. It's built on Marc Andressen's and Co.'s Ning.

Amy's been on a great rampage about blog commenting since opening The Right Conversation blog. Good work, good thinking going on over there.

If I ever come off that way, tell me, would you?

A good motivation for never becoming famous is nobody will ever draw a caricature of you.