Flock sounds interesting: a social web browser. Unfortunately it’s on a private beta at the moment, but features apparently include a wysiwyg editor for posting to weblogs [1], built-in social bookmarking a la del.icio.us, and a bunch of other features as this review reveals:

But it rocks. Setup was very easy (I tested it with my personal blog). It has functionality for editing posts (even posts not created with Flock), quick toggle between preview and viewing the actual code, and, the best feature in my opinion, the ability to simply drag flickr photos direclty into the post and manipulate them. They also allow quick and easy technorati tagging. Wow. I mean, really, wow. This stuff is not trivial to build. The ajax funtionality is stunning.

I’d really like to see it, not least because I’d like to get it working with Elgg (it’s based on Mozilla so some kind of plugin for extra functionality should be possible). If anyone’s at liberty to knock me an invite code .. nudge nudge ..

[1] Elgg will, naturally, have a wysiwyg editor very soon

I posted the following article over on my personal blog but I thought I’d post it here too, because it exactly fits my vision of not only how things are going to go, but also how they should go. That goes for the Web in general and Elgg specifically; when the Web is integrated with the operating system, a whole new world opens up for you. One’s learning landscape can then be totally integrated with everything you do on the computer – and the number and variety of applications available to you increases exponentially, because you remove the software supplier bottleneck.

Anyway, I’ll give you the link and let you decide for yourself:

• Jason Kottke ponders Web 3.0

I’d be very interested to hear your thoughts.

Is technology in schools the future or just a fad? The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel talks about e-learning. (An aside: when something gets covered in local papers, does that mean it’s hit the mainstream?)

A brief read seems to suggest people don’t know what to do with computers once they’re in the classroom, short of running a couple of Powerpoint presentations. I think this quote is pertinent:

“There have always been and will always be pockets of interesting activity and innovation going on around the country, but in most schools, kids maybe search the Web, they make PowerPoint presentations,” said Margaret Honey, director of the Center for Children and Technology in New York. “Those are all good things. But we could easily build on those activities and make them much more rigorous and applicable to the 21st century if we wanted to … For the most part, I think we’re not.”

Yet another case of teachers applying old-school teaching techniques to new-school facilities?

It isn’t perfect yet, but personal tag clouds are available at:

http://elgg.net/your username/tags/

So for example, mine is at http://elgg.net/bwerdmuller/tags/ and Dave’s is at http://elgg.net/dtosh/tags. I’m keeping them unlinked until they’re how I want them (they need to aggregate a user’s content rather than search for content across the network), but I thought I’d announce their presence.

Okay, so I was probably overoptimistic about the personal tag clouds and geographic details, but this week they will definitely appear. I’m also seriously looking at WebDAV – the ability to mount your file repository as a drive is incredibly attractive. Shouldn’t be too hard to code, either; have any of the programmers out there experimented with it?

Around the corner from my office they’re holding the Moodle Moot 2005 – the UK & Ireland Moodle conference. I wonder if there are any Elgg users present?

Hidden away in this Guardian article is a mention of one of the Wikimedia Foundation’s upcoming projects post-Wikipedia: a free, online curriculum stretching from kindergarten to university. I know about WikiBooks, but this ounds like something more – I’ll definitely be keeping an eye out for more news.

I’m building a ‘recent activity’ page that will allow you to view activity on your account performed by other users – for example comments left on weblog posts, friends and unfriends.

I’m also going to build a personal ‘tag cloud’ page, which will appear sometime over the next week (after I’ve added geographic info to the user info, and before I finish the first major build of the admin panel).

So those are my plans as they stand on this annoyingly wintery Sunday afternoon. What are yours?

Elgg currently outputs some very simply DOT code at elgg.net/_dotty. I originally had the script include the “news” user, which most people have retained on their friends list, which yielded the following friendship diagram:

{{file:1294}}

I’ve since removed it, and the results -

{{file:1295}}
{{file:1296}}

- are interesting. There’s a background sea of people who haven’t friended anyone, who are the ones who have heard about Elgg and have come in to see what the fuss is about but haven’t done anything with their accounts. Then there’s a bunch of clusters, including one great big connected graph in the middle. I’ll try and figure out what percentage of people are connected, but it’s worth considering that for 99% of Elgg.net users, there’s no pressure to participate in the community at all. Check out a top-down system like the one produced by OSPI, and the numbers of people using the system of their own accord (as opposed to being forced) are going to drop massively.

Of course, the Elgg.net use case is different to the system as used within an institution, where it’s likely that users would be even more tightly interconnected, particularly if certain associations were “pre-loaded”. (e.g., the next batch of undergraduate computer scientists automatically made members of the “Computer Science Graduation Class of 2009″ community.) Kicking involvement off in this way, as well as making it an active part of communication within the school or organisation, would encourage greater involvement. There’s also nothing to say that the disconnected users aren’t using their personal weblogs for individual reflection.

Dave’s been doing a great job importing some cool themes and getting the software ready for internationalisation. Neither Dave nor I speak anything other than English, but we’ve got a development installation running in a delightful shade of Babelfish French. Once we’ve got the language choosing framework up and running we’ll make the gettext template file available and we should be on the road to creating a number of language packs.

At some point this week I also intend to write a friends-to-Dotty converter so I can create visual maps of the relationships within Elgg. My curiosity as to what the community would look like if the relationships were visualised has been getting at me for a while now, and I figure some of you might be curious to see how everyone relates.

Finally, after a quick discussion with Misja, I’m going to write a plug-in to allow users to provide optional location information from the user settings. This will allow for tools that will, for example, allow you to discover other users geographically close to you, adding a new dimension to search: if you were so inclined, you could look for everyone in the same city as you interested in 20th century literature. Perhaps that wouldn’t be so useful within a single physical institution, but in a wider landscape of users it might come in handy.