Ruminate

If you have a Bloglines account and you attempt to add my site feed (try this link), it will show you 11 different feed links, almost all of which aren’t my actual feedburner feeds actually redirect to the same if you try them! Why are these there?

And don’t even get me started about the odd specific category subscription links, which don’t even exist!

The CoComment service has undergone a major update and it is much more useful now. If you don’t remember, CoComment is a service that allows you to track blog comments. When you make a comment it is added to your CoComment list of conversations, which is updated anytime someone else makes a comment. Until now, such notifications were limited to other CoComment users. Now they are crawling the conversations and updating when anyone posts, which means it’s actually useful, not just an interesting proof-of-concept.

You can, of course, subscribe to an RSS feed to be notified when new comments have been added to comment threads you have contributed to… less clutter in the mailbox!

Gmail is fantastic for mailing list subscriptions– subscribe to your favorite lists, filter them with labels, and you can both participate at your leisure and have a ready, personal archive when you need one that groups the vast majority of conversations properly.

Until now, the only thing that has been missing in this scenario is the ability to mark all unread messages in a label as being read. For instance, my PHP-Lists folder has more than 10,000 unread messages. The only way to mark past messages read was screen by screen– which takes a while even at 100 messages per clip.

No longer… now when you “select all” while viewing a label’s contents you will get a second option to select all conversation in the folder:

The last piece of the puzzle is in place.

In a comment here, one of the good folks from Dandelife mentions that they are working on specifically educationally oriented features, such as creating biographies of historical figures. I will try those as soon as I see them.

But I wanted to note how useful Dandelife could be as it stands. One of the most fruitful exercises I ever used in a composition class was having students create pieces based on memory. That kind of exercise would be so much richer if done inside Dandelife, where the timeline interface and filtering would allow for easier navigation and the tags would provide for that wonderful element of serendipity and ironic juxtaposition.

Or, for more sophisticated users, how about realizing a true hypertext composition, a series of interconnected prose poems or vignettes tied together through the rich timeline. Get out the camera and integrate pictures and video and immediately compelling content is instantly possible.

FYI: if you are going to try Dandelife out, this blog entry about their features is required reading… there’s always something new around the corner!

Matthew Hurst is doing some amazing work visualizing blogs and social networks. For example, check out his interactive map of the blogosphere and some of his static representations.

Blogoforum is the first fully tag-based discussion forum that I’ve seen. It eschews sub-forums and categorization for tags, and any post can become the start of a new thread. Interesting (and a bit chaotic). Looks like Vennt will be doing something similar…

The new (and still in beta) Dandelife is an extremely promising new social authoring platform which the creators are referring to as a “social biography network.” In essence, Dandelife is a social network of life stories. You tell your stories, tag them with the date or date span, tag them, optionally link to relevant flickr and/or YouTube video and the Dandelife system presents them on a scrolling timeline. You can navigate by time and/or by tag, across users or drill down into the stories of one user.

As an educator I can see a dozen potential immediate uses for this, particular for all those projects that involve working with historical events, family histories, memories, etc. But just as a general environment this is something that is similar to– but in important ways very different from– typical blogging. In the same way that geo-tagging photos is a simple act that allows relationships to be revealed and connections discovered in new ways, the time and time-span tagging of these life stories creates a new way to navigate and discover these stories.

Years ago I worked in the tourist industry. We would entertain bus after bus of older travellers. I used to imagine how many amazing stories there were that would never be told or discovered on just one of those buses out of the thousands that came through every summer. Similarly, I imagine a service like this populated with a good number of high quality entries– wouldn’t it be an amazing experience just to browse through such a bounty?
Even in these early stages, this is a fascinating project…