So, here’s your chance to get hold of not just a great established PR 5/6 ‘about blogs’ site that could easily be converted into a damn good publication with ads sorta thing, but also a business in it’s own right that’ll get you heaps of contacts for blog consultancy, development, design and whatever else you fancy.

Check out this Google for Blog Consultant, for example.. .not hard to get to number 1 again :)

Bidding starts at $5K and you can walk away with it today for $10K.

This is a joint project between Andrew Billits and myself and is, I guess, the natural addition to WPMUDEV Premium.

Now you don’t even have to worry about implementing our custom plugins and functionality, ‘cos you can get us to do it for you, warts and all.

Yep, that’s right, we’ll design, build, customise, support and even host your blog community or network… and we’ll do it damn well too thankyouverymuch.

Does this make us the first WPMU consultancy? I reckon it does (in a public sense at least).

Let us know what you think of the site and concept on our blog.

Oh, and tell all your friends :)

This is a joint project between Andrew Billits and myself that aims to find a way to provide complex custom plugins, materials, hacks and support for WordPress MultiUser (WPMU) for a fraction of the amount you’d have to pay a developer.

It’s already stuffed full of goodies; there’s the multi-database code that’s used on Edublogs (happily supporting 50,000 blogs on the one domain), mu-plugins to give you the lowdown on all your user activity (active users, posts, comments and more!), unbranded support videos for you to use on your WPMU site and a new bumper theme pack with uploadable headers a gogo.

And lots, lots, lots, more… which we’re going to be adding to all the time.

Plus there are comprehensive support forums to back up all of the code there.

Oh, and you can suggest projects that you’d like to see, and if they’re feasible we’ll look into developing them… not bad huh!

Sure, in an ideal world we’d like to be releasing all of this for free, but an *enormous* amount of time has gone into developing it and we’d like to get a system going whereby we can actually support ourselves (and eventually others?) in providing an equal amount of ongoing development and support… while being able to afford to eat.

So, here you have it… let us know what you think and, um, tell all your friends :D

In my first ever post - four years ago this month - I wondered how I could provide this wonderful technology to teachers and learners. There was the visionary Manila (too hard - for me) and the ever present Blogger (too out of your control) but it wasn’t until WPMU came along that things started to click.

And the rest, as they say, is history.

However, there’s always been something missing from Edublogs - yes you can have student blogs at learnerblogs.org, uniblogs.org or eslblogs.org - but the problem with multi-user blogging is that it’s never been, well, multi-multi-user.

So - what now seems a loooong time ago I began work on what I present to you today, the ability for anyone to set-up, almost instantly their own fully featured educational blog hosting service, Edublogs in a box, Edublogs Premium.

And I have to say, I’m pretty excited :)

Each site has all the functionality - and a bit more (like complete privacy options) - that I have at Edublogs.

You can manage, create, design and run your own educational blogging site, fully hosted by us, for what I hope is a very very reasonable price (including free set-up to our first batch of clients too).

What’s even better in my book is that this will allow free education blogs at Edublogs to continue to grow and develop without advertising and with security. Schools and educators who want the extra functionality can grab themselves an Edublogs Premium account and this will support educators and schools who don’t need the full whack or can’t afford it.

Sounds pretty damn good to me.

I can’t begin to thank all of you who have used, promoted or supported first Incsub and then Edublogs down the track. Absolutely none of this would be possible without the plain bloody genius of Donncha O Caoimh, the selfless and brilliant members of the WPMU forums and the good folk at Automattic who have done so much to bring WPMU forward. To say I simply owe these people would be an enormous understatement!

So, here we go, wish me luck!

Basically it’s me making baby gazelle steps into writing about new media in the context of my job at theage.com.au.

The name is a play all sorts of things, I’ll get to that later, but you should expect some critical and overly opinionated commentary on blogs, citizen media, online news sites and more.

If you’re of that persuasion you can grab the feed here.

Today’s post is all about how comments are way too overrated in big news sites - especially as they are currently done. Go weigh in :)

While not regular blogsavvy fare I think there is a particularly significant issue here regarding the differentiation between forum contribution (for examples NY Times Opinion or Guardian Comment is Free style) and the responsibility of a ‘blog provider’ (for example WordPress.com, edublogs.org or even Le Monde Blogs).

In particular you’ll note that most of these comment sites have fairly in depth coverage of what is and is not acceptable, what will happen to stuff that isn’t acceptable and means by which community users can complain / report these issues (a la the DMCA which I refer to in more detail in the post), whereas as a rule I don’t see this on blogging sites apart from in various hidden away ToS agreements which you’re moreorless encouraged to ignore.

Now I’m not arguing that we should be reminding users of their legal responsibility (if, indeed, it is *their* legal responsibility and not ours) at every step but am wondering whether this leaves us open to attack… anyway, more over at the incsub post, let me know your take on it!

Blackboard beware… we’re coming after you ;)

Will report the results (as much as Lisa will let me) here.

I mean, the concept is great, especially if you want students / probloggers / business people or just plain old you to be able to write material that is instantly semantically organised, structured and meta tagged to high heaven. No more behind the scenes coding, no more tricky headings / subheadings etc. and it’ll even automatically post at multiple locations through Outputthis.org and add in your Amazon Affiliate details. What more could you want?

However, in reality I’m not sure if it’s that simple and something bugs me about form filling and the impact that might have on content & creativity. Naturally this is going to help all of you SEO folks no end but does it work for your everyday blogger? I’m tempted to say ‘no’.

First up it harks back to pre WSYWIG days (these are a distant and painful memory for any WPMU site owners “um, it’s called a ‘quicktag’ etc. etc. :) just allowing users text into particular forms and a single image upload. Secondly these forms are, as you would expect, pretty overdone in terms of detail, great for a data entry clerk (or a computer… if you like your blogging that way, some smart bunny could get this to strip every book off Amazon and then just write the ‘reviews’ and watch the adsense /affiliate stuff come on it) but not for you or me, really.

But most importantly, perhaps, it reminds me far too much of MS Word Wizards back in the day. The principle is essentially the same and we know that they were invariably painful, unpleasant and unnecessary problems… solved by (in the case of most publishers - which is what we are after al) the uses of different *styles & formatting*.

And perhaps that’s where we ought to be heading… in our ultimately wonderfully subvertable blogging world… towards ’styled blogging’ where we can semantically create our documents on the fly and in the way we want rather than through a pile of forms. We’re already on our way there with enclosures and tags, a push in the WSYWIG direction towards AV icons with relevant fields could make a lot more sense and be a lot more usable.

So why don’t ya go and make a bunch of kiwis very very happy by proposing a paper, poster, praxis or workshop… beautiful Wellington combined with a quick scoot round the island sounds like a good way to spend the middle of March to me!!!