In my recent Leeds presentation, Weblogs: Niche or Nucleus?, I proposed that one of the key affordances of the blog is as an authoring engine for syndicated feeds. In turn, this is contributing to a recognition that syndication solutions, like RSS or Atom, are emerging as the ultimate low barrier, increasingly ubiquitous, metadata solutions. So far so good. But the dot coms have entered, or are eying, this space and that raises some interesting issues for those wanting to exploit this approach to accessing distributed learning resources and tools. I applaud the pioneers like Stephen Downes who recognized, earlier than most, that low barrier to entry metadata solutions like RSS, plus the tools and services to exploit them, provide a highly efficient accessible way to aggregate and provide access to distributed learning resources. Downes doesn't just theorize about the possibilities; instead he makes available his Edu_RSS, Distributed Learning Object Repository Network (DLORN), and most recently his Ed Radio services. But look very carefully at that last word in the previous sentence … we'll return to it later.
In a previous Auricle article Blog syndication as a business model?
I attempted to summarize some of key points of the business vision promulgated in the Morgan Stanley report An Update from the Digital World, October 2004 (pdf).
A couple of quotes from the report are worth repeating:
“In our model, Yahoo! potentially serves as an 'agnostic' Associated Press, collecting freelance pieces from the Web, and distributes a portion of the revenue generated by advertising in each one its syndicated papers, meaning each of those personal syndicated feeds that users set up.” (page 15)
“RSS and syndication work admirably well for text feeds, but we believe a natural extension of the format could be to images, audio, and video … an early version of syndicated (multimedia) feeds is podcasting. Podcasting allows users to subscribe to feeds of Internet radio shows through RSS … a description of the show appears, along with an announcement to the RSS reader that an audio file is in the feed. The twist here is that – with free applications such as iPodder – the audio file is downloaded automatically and put in the playlists on your iPod .” (page 14)
So Mammon now wants to enter this space and they either want your content or your eyeballs:)
One such example from the commercial space is FeedBurner which describes itself as:
“… an RSS/Atom post-processing service that allows publishers to enhance their feeds in a variety of interesting and powerful ways. By republishing their feeds through FeedBurner, publishers gain detailed feed statistics, maximum feed format compatibility, “shockproofing” to absorb bandwidth spikes, and more.”
We now, also, have 'free' dot com alternatives to the Downes' provision, e.g. Bloglines , and Blogdigger. And pretty polished 'free' services they are to.
Blogdigger describes itself thus:
“Blogdigger Groups allows you to combine the contents of two or more blogs making the combined content easily accessible all at once … You can create a Blogdigger Group using any blogs that have RSS feeds. Once you specify the feeds that comprise your Blogdigger Group you will be able to view the posts from those feeds, sorted by date, and even export your group in OPML or OCS, or subscribe to your Blogdigger Group as an RSS feed.”
If you want to see how 'free' services, like Bloglines, could be integrated into an educational environment then I suggest you visit (or revisit) the seminar 'end products' section of Brian Lamb and Alan Levine’s Educase 2004 wiki seminar - Rip, Mix, Feed: Decentralization of Learning Resources: Syndicating Learning Objects Using RSS, Trackback, and Related Technologies
Or for a Blogdigger example of meta syndication look at the learning objects group established by, I believe, Alan Levine of Maricopa Learning eXchange fame.
Now these dot com entrants are pretty impressive and polished examples and, following the Brian Lamb/Alan Levine demonstration above, I can see how modules of courses could be considerably enhanced by their contribution but … there's always a but:)
Informal learning is one thing but in a HEI context designing, developing, and implementing educational programmes and modules needs to assume robust foundations.
Or to put it more starkly, while I would love to use a Bloglines, Blogdigger et al, what a disaster it could turn out to be if the 'free' service was suddenly not there one day, or a champion like Stephen Downes was no longer able to provide his excellent Edu RSS/DLORN etc? Alternatively, what if having registered on Bloglines, Blogdigger et al and built a dependency to these services within my course, the company changes its business model and wants to charge big fees so that it can stay in business; remember the Movable Type hiatus which led to an exodus from that product?
You may think I'm taking too pessimistic a view. Don't get me wrong I'm grateful that these services exist, if for no other reason than they demonstrate what's possible. But here's a reminder of what can happen when we become too dependent on 'free' services:
“In an audio message posted late Monday explaining his reasons for the shutdown (of Weblogs.com in June 2004), Winer cited the financial costs of hosting the sites, technical difficulties in moving the blogs to a new server, stress and personal health issues as the reasons for the sudden shutdown.” http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,63856,00.html
I'm sure there are many courses worldwide which successfully use 'free services' like Google or Blogger.com. I'm also sure that Microsoft's new blogging solution MSN Spaces, which integrates with its email, messaging and media player will be very successful.
I'm also sure that if we are not careful we will enter a new phase of 'lock in'.
But what's the alternatives?
Ironically, one of the key beneficiaries from the Movable Type hiatus was the open source WordPress initiative which, in its genre, is already a pretty impressive blogging tool and is likely to get even more impressive. WordPress is just the latest addition to an already impressive portfolio of first class open-source tools, e.g. Mozilla Firefox, and now Mozilla Thunderbird. WordPress is a good example of a community developed and supported initiative and, from personal experience, it's developed excellent responsive support forums.
But where's the community-supported equivalents of Bloglines and Blogdigger? Stephen Downes has shown the way here, but do we now need a WordPress/Firefox/Thunderbird type initiative that can match or exceed what Bloglines and Blogdigger can do?
Alternatively, could the HE and tertiary sectors, e.g. not facilitate the development of open-source equivalents of Bloglines/Blogdigger? Is there a JISC project in there somewhere?
