One of the projects I’m working on with French colonial history scholar Susan Peabody this semester at WSU is building a virtual, wiki-based museum with her students in a history course. We’re using a Wikity-based WordPress template to do it, and while we’re not utilizing the forking elements in it, we’re actually finding the Markdown… Continue reading

This is a series of posts I’ve finally decided to write on the subject of what I call “connected copies”, an old pattern in software that is solving a lot of current problems. Part one of the series is here. It’s really a bit of a brain dump. But it’s my first attempt to explain… Continue reading

So Amazon is getting into the Open Educational Resources market. What do we think about that? If you read these pages regularly, you can probably predict what I’ll say. It’s the wrong model. For over a decade and a half we’ve focused on getting OER into central sites that everyone can find. Or developing “registries” to index… Continue reading

This is a series of posts I’ve finally decided to write on the subject of what I call “connected copies”, an old pattern in software that is solving a lot of current problems. It’s really a bit of a brain dump. But it’s my first attempt to explain these concepts starting at a point most… Continue reading

SoundCloud, a music publishing site which holds millions of original works not held elsewhere (and over a hundred million works total), may be in trouble. And if it is in trouble, we’ll lose much of that music, forever. The situation is, of course, ridiculous. I know I sound like a broken, um, MP3 file on… Continue reading

As you doubtless know by now, in 2010 I went and gave a plenary at UMW on the Liberal Arts in an era of Just-In-Time Learning, drank more than any human really should at the various parade of after-events, predicted the coming onslaught of xMOOCs in a drunken vision, and ended up going back to… Continue reading

In case you don’t know, I believe the future of the web involves moving away from the idea of centralized, authoritative locations and into something I call “connected copies”. The idea is that the current model of the web, which is based on the places where things live instead of the names of things, creates natural choke points… Continue reading

Making a quicker pass at the reply to Dave Winer below, I want to call out one radical idea that people don’t get: You should be able to browse the web through your own website. As an example of this, consider my Wikity interface when I’m logged in (if you’re not logged in the interface… Continue reading

Dave Winer wrote a recent post on, roughly, how to reboot the Blogosphere with JSON. I read it last night and thought I understood it, then read it again this morning and realized I’d missed the core idea of what he was saying. Here’s the relevant graf: But there is another approach, to have WordPress… Continue reading

Update: If you read the comments below you’ll see one of the API developers has responded; there are some issues with private information in short codes being exposed. I still wish all the smart-quotification, m-dashing, and paragraphing could be more easily disabled, but I’m very grateful for the quick and thoughtful response. ——- I wasted… Continue reading