BLOGSAVVY

This is part of a larger, ongoing series which examines how - in 2005 / 2006 - you can give people blogs. Visit the contents page to see the lot (or suggest more content!) or grab the feed to keep up with new stuff!

Manila and Userland software, driven by Dave Winer, were the pioneers of blogging, RSS and social software back in the day… my first blog was powered by Radio Userland and, in some significant ways, the design functionality and application of these tools is amazingly insightful.

A simple feature list of the software is enough to blow you away, not only does it give you the capacity to create multiple blogs but you also have attached a genuine content / web management system, totally flexible templating and fully functional blog tools. Add to this built in individual aggregators (something unique, still, to Manila and which could crack the market for the OS blog application that comes up with an effective use of this).

But but but but but there’s also something very very wrong. The user interface is painful, the development seems to have stalled in the last three years to almost nothing and the system seems increasingly bulky, buggy and incompatible with what we now expect from our web publishing applications. In short, it was a great idea… it’s still a great idea… but it was an average implementation which is now pretty lousy.

I have absolutely no doubt that had development really kicked on with this system it would be a world beater, but at over $1000 a pop per/annum for a non-educational licence with such attractive competition I’d now be slow to recommend it to anyone who doesn’t have a great degree of patience, fairly average expectations and is reluctant to go with an open source solution.

Shame :(

Find expert WordPress and WordPress MultiUser (WPMU) development and consulting at Incsub.

The Antipodean points to an article in the Age in which:

“Federal Liberal MP Malcolm Turnbull has called for the Government to give every Australian their own email address for life.”

Sometimes being an Aussie can be a tad frustrating…

I mean, I think it was a year and a half ago that the NSW govt splashed out $84 million on providing every frickin school with email.

This really has to stop.

For the same amount of money the government could provide every single Australian with their own fully featured Content Management System / Blog.

We have the tools and the hardware costs would be the same (or a lot less).

Imagine it, every resident could have their own area, their own digital space and voice… they could be geospatially aggregated in community contexts… multiple voices, platforms and audiences.

Bloody hell, using the global categories function in WPMU you could even have communities of interest in a city, let alone a neighbourhood. Whack in the tagging that Bud is also incorporating alongside WPMU and your folksonomy is your community.

What a brilliant public service!

Please somebody, anybody, hire me to make this happen!

Find expert WordPress and WordPress MultiUser (WPMU) development and consulting at Incsub.

This is part of a larger, ongoing series which examines how - in 2005 / 2006 - you can give people blogs. Visit the contents page to see the lot (or suggest more content!) or grab the feed to keep up with new stuff!

Elgg is a powerful open source social networking application which uses blogs as the foundation of the the system and does it in a very interesting way.

What makes Elgg stand out from pretty much all the other implementations in this series is that it, by default, relys strongly on FOAF and the contextual positioning of the user in the community. Think of it as being a bit like your own LiveJournal environemnt that’s easy as heck to install and quite possibly a fair bit more simple to run.

Once a user is logged into an Elgg installation they are have the capacity to add (and remove) any number of other users as Friends and share / not share alls orts of different material, files and more with them. Obviously they also have a pretty solid blogging platform with plentiful themes to choose from, simple and straightforward posting systems and a refreshingly simple commenting system. Heck you can go and try it out for yourself at Apcala or Elgg.net… why dontcha?

At this point it’s also well worth noting that at the moment Dave and Ben are offering free hosting / implementation to people wanting to experiement / use Elgg!

Of course, at 0.2 (0.3 coming later in September), it’s fairly immature, but at the same time it’s extremely robust. Areas that could be improved upon include ‘master’ admin options and settings, blog formatting and file inclusion facilities and there’s always the challenge of only having a limited control over the blog design that is shared by many ‘inclusive’ blogging systems. However, especially if you’re coming at this from an educational perspective - it’s subtitled appropriately ‘a learning landscape’ - are fond of social networking and FOAF applications and would like an inclusive system with a heck of a lot of potential… then you could do a lot worse than having a run at this.

Download Elgg from Sourceforge or get in touch with the men behind it.

Find expert WordPress and WordPress MultiUser (WPMU) development and consulting at Incsub.