Having posted about Single Item RSS Feeds on WordPress blogs: RSS For the Content of This Page, it struck me that whilst this facility might be of interest to a very, very select few, most people would probably have the response: so what?

To answer that question, it might help if I let you into a little secret: I’m not really that into content, open educational or otherwise. What I am interested in is how content can flow around the web, and how it can be re-presented in different ways and different places around the web by different people, all pulling on the same source.

So if we consider single page RSS feeds, what this means is that I can re-present the content of any of my WordPress blogged posts anywhere that accepts RSS. So for example, I could view just that post as a Wordle generated word cloud, or subscribe to the RSS version of single blog post on a Netvibes page (maybe along with other related posts):

and view the post in that location:

(At the moment not many other platforms appear to offer single page RSS feeds. I was hopeful that the Guardian might, because they have quite a well developed feed platform, but I couldn’t find a way to grab a single page feed trivially from a page URI:-(

To see why that might be useful, you need to know another of my little secrets. I don’t really think of RSS feeds being used to transport new content, such as the latest posts from the many blogs I still subscribe to. For sure, they can be used for that purpose, and a great many RSS readers are set up to accommodate that sort of use (only showing you feed items you haven’t already read, for example), but that is a special case. The more general case is simply that feeds are used to transport content that has quite a simple structure around the web. And this content might be fixed, static, immutable. That is, the content of the feed might never change once the feed has been created, as in the case of OpenLearn course unit full content RSS feeds.

AS AN ASIDE… I generally think of RSS feeds as providing a way of transporting simple content “items” around where each item has a quite simple structure:

If you think of a blog post or news article as an item, the title is hopefully obvious (the title of the post/article), the description is the content “body” of the item (e.g. the text content of the news article) and the link is the URL of where that post or article can be found on the web. The other elements are optional: what I refer to as annotations correspond to things like latitude and longitude co-ordinates that can be used add geographical information to the item so that it can b plotted on a map for example; and what I term a payload would be something like an audio file that gets delivered when you subscribe to an RSS podcast feed from somewhere like iTunes or IT Conversations.

Once you start viewing RSS feeds as a general transport mechanism, then you start to see the world in a slightly different way… So for example: the a href=”http://ouseful.wordpress.com/2009/07/08/single-item-rss-feeds-on-wordpress-blogs-rss-for-the-content-of-this-page/”>Single Item RSS Feeds post reveals how to create single item RSS feeds from the URL of a blog post hosted on WordPress. Now if I bookmark a series of WordPress hosted blog posts to somewhere like the delicious.com social bookmarking site, and tag them all in the same way, I can get an RSS feed out that contains a list of posts that can be obtained in XML form (that is, as single item RSS feeds).

Hmmm….

So maybe if I find a series of posts from WordPress blogs all over the world on a particular topic, I can create my own custom RSS feed of those posts that I can use as the basis of a reading list, for example, or to feed a Netvibes page on a particular topic, or even to feed an RSS2PDF service*?

* these needn’t be really horrible and divisive… For example, the Feedjournal service will take in an RSS feed and produce a rather nice looking newspaper version of your feed… ;-)

Now it just so happens, I’ve prepared one of these earlier. In particular, I’ve posted a small collection of blog posts on the topic of WordPress from a variety of (WordPress) blogs at http://delicious.com/psychemedia/singlefeeddemo:

You’ll notice that I can get an RSS feed of this list out too: from http://delicious.com/rss/psychemedia/singlefeeddemo in fact.

Now the links I’ve bookmarked are links to the original HTML page version of each blog post; but all it takes is the simple matter of rewriting those URLs by adding ?feed=rss2&withoutcomments=1 on to the end of them to get the RSS version of each post.

Hmm… Yahoo Pipes, where are you? Let’s just pull in the RSS feed of those WordPress hosted blog post bookmarks, and rewrite the URLs to their single item RSS feed equivalent:

Now we can loop through each of those items, and replace it with the actual content of those single item RSS feeds:

The output of the pipe is then a real RSS feed that contains items that correspond to the content of WordPress blog posts that I have bookmarked on delicious.

Now just think about this for a moment: most RSS feeds are transitory – the content that appears in the feed on a blog post is a reverse chronological list of the 10 or 20 most recent items on the blog (or in a particular category on a particular blog). The feed we are pulling in to this pipe may be fixed (e.g. if we create a list of bookmarks tagged in a particular way, and then don’t tag any more bookmarks in that way) and used to create a very specific a list of blog posts from all over the web. By rewriting the URLs to get the RSS version of each bookmarked post, we can create our own full RSS feed of those list items. (Actually, that isn’t quite true – if the blog is configured to only emit partial RSS feeds, we’ll only get a partial version of a post, typically the first sentence or two.)

(Pipes’ homepages only show preview versions of a feed description, even if the full description is available.)

Just to recap, here’s the whole pipe:

We take in a list of bookmarked URLs that correspond to bookmarked WordPress blog posts, and generate the single item RSS feed URL for each post. We then use these URLs to pull in the content for each post, and this create out own, full content custom RSS feed. The pipe itself emits RSS, so w can take the RSS feed from the pipe and feed it into any service that consumes RSS, such as Feedjournal:

Alternatively, I could subscribe to the pipe’s output feed in somewhere like Netvibes (or even a VLE) and then view the contents of my customised feed in that location. Or I could import that feed into a new WordPress blog. And so on…

Now of course I appreciate that many people will still say: so what? But it’s a start… a small step towards a world in which I can declare an arbitrary list of links to content spread all over the web and then pull it into a single location where I can consume it, or process it further, such as converting it into a PDF (which is a preferred way of consuming large chunks of content for many people) or even delivering it in drip feed fashion over an extended period of time as a serialised RSS feed, for example.

An exercise for the interested reader: clone the pipe and modify it so that it will accept as user input an RSS URL so that the pipe can be used to consume any social bookmarking service RSS feed.

Note: as the pipe stands, the order of items in the feed will correspond to the order in which they were bookmarked. It is possible to tag each bookmark with its desired position in the RSS feed, but that is a rather more advanced topic. (See a soon to be(?!)* deprecated solution to that problem here: Ordered Lists of Links from delicious Using Yahoo Pipes.

* If @hapdaniel hasn’t already published a more elegant solution to this problem using YQL Execute somewhere, I’ll try to do so when I get a chance…

PS ho hum, maybe we don’t need RSS after all: Instapaper, Del.icio.us, Yahoo! Pipes and being Slack (via @mediaczar)

[This post is a more complete working of Mash Oop North – Pipes Mashup by Way of an Apology]

Keeping current with journal articles in a particular subject area is one of the challenges that faces many researchers, and by implication the academic and research librarians tasked with supporting the information needs of those researchers.

This relatively simple recipe shows how to create a “two dimensional” search that allows a user to provide two sets of keywords, one to identify a set of journals in a particular subject area, the other to filter the current articles down to a particular subtopic in that subject area.

What this demo shows is:
- how to pull in a list of journals in a particular subject area based on user provided keywords into the Yahoo pipes environment;
- how to pull in the most recent table of contents from those journals into that environment;
- how to then filter those recent articles to only display articles on a particular subtopic.

Th starting point for this recipe is jOPML, a service created by Scott Wilson that allows you to run a keyword search on the titles of journals whose tables of contents are made available as RSS on ticTOCs and a generate an OPML feed containing the RSS feed URLs for those journal TOCS. (OPML is an XML formatted language that, among other things, can be used to transport bundles of RSS feed URLs around the web. In much the same way that RSS is one of the most effective ways of transporting sets of links to web pages around the web (as for example in the case of RSS feeds from social bookmarking sites such as delicious), so OPML is one of the best ways of moving collections of RSS links around.)

Now as well as consuming RSS feeds, Yahoo Pipes can also pull in other data formats. So for example:

- the Fetch Feed block can pull in a wide variety of RSS flavoured forms (different versions of RSS, Atom etc); [Handy tip - a pipe that just wires a Fetch Feed block direct to the pip output can be used to "normalise" different flavours of RSS/Atom in order to provide a single, standard feed format at the output of the pipe. ]<

- Fetch Data can be used to import XML and JSON into the pipes environment (with Fetch CSV pulling in CSV data files, from sources such as Google Spreadsheets);

- Fetch Page can be used to load HTML web pages into Yahoo Pipes, providing the means by which to develop simple screen scraping applications within the Pipes environment.

What this means is that we can pull in the OPML file generated by jOPML into the Yahoo Pipes environment and have a play with it :-)

So let’s see how. To start with, we need to find a way of getting arbitrary OPML files out of jOPML. Running a search for science history on jOPML returns:

with the OPML available here: http://jopml.org/feeds.opml?q=science+history

Looking at this URI, you’ll hopefully see that it contains the search terms used to query the journals database on jOPML. In effect, the URI is an API to the jOPML service. By rewriting the URI, we can make different calls on the jOPML service, and return different OPML files for different topic areas.

AS-AN-ASIDE TAKE HOME POINT: many URIs effectively provide an API to a web service. If you ever see a search form, run some queries using it, and look at the URIs of th results page. If you can see your search terms in the URI, you are now in a position to construct your own queires to that service simply by using the URI, rather than having to go by the search form.

It’s not just search terms that appear in URIs either. For example, the ISBN Playground will generate a wide variety of URIs that are all “keyed” using an arbitrary ISBN. (Actually, thot’s not quite true; many of them require ISBN 10 format ISBNs. But there are ways around that, as I’ll show in a later post…) If I’m missing any URIs you know of that contain ISBNs, please let me know in a comment to this post ;-)

Anyway, that’s more than enough of that! Let’s go back to the 2D journal search recipe, and let the pipework begin…

The main idea bhind Yahoo pipes is to “wire” together different components in order to complete some sort of task. When you create a new Yahoo pipe you are presented with an empty canvas that dominates the screen on which to create your “pipe”, and a menu area on the left that contains different blocks that you can use to create your pipe.

Blocks are added to the canvas either by dragging them from th menu area and dropping them on the canvas, or clicking the + symbol on the block you want in the menu area, which adds it to the canvas automatically.

Blocks are wired together by clicking on the circle on the bottom of a block and dragging and dropping the “wire” onto a circle on the top of the next block in your pipe.

The idea is that content flows through one block into the next, entering the block along its top edge, being processed by the block as appropriate, and then passing out through the bottom edge of the block.

Blocks that do not have an input circle on the top edge are used to pull content into the pipe from elsewhere. (These can be found in the Sources part of the menu panel.)

In contrast, the Pipe output block does not have any circles on its lower edge – the output from this block is exposed to the outside world on the the pipe’s public home page. (The single pipe output block is added to the canvas automatically when you add an input block. Pipes can have multiple input blocks, but only on output block.)

(If this sort of interaction design appeals to you – that is, “wiring” separate components in some sort of linear workflow together – a Javascript library is available that implements the drag, drop and wire features so you can implement an interface similar to the Yahoo Pipes interface in your own web applications: WireIt – a Javascript Wiring Library. To see WireIt in action, check out Tarpipe.)

So where do we start? The first thing to do is to construct the URI to the OPML feed that we can then use to pull in the OPML feed for a set of journals on a particular topic:

If you highlight a block by clicking on it, it will glow orange. You can then inspect the output from just this block by looking in the preview pan at the bottom of the screen:

The “Journal keywords (text)” block is actually a Text input block:

The URL builder constructs a URL from the fixed elements of the URI (the page location http://jopml.org/feeds.opml and the query variable q) and the user inputted search terms. The user inputs are exposed as text entry boxes on the front page of the pipe as well by arguments in the URI for the pipe (e.g. in the same way that the query terms appear in the jOPML URIs).

In order to import the contents of the jOPML file, we can use the Fetch Datablock.

To see what we’ll be working with, here’s what an original OPML file looks like:

If we load this XML file into Pipes, we need to tell the Fetch Data block what parts of the OPML file which should use as separate items in within the pipe. Looking at the OPML file, we ideally want each journal to be represented as a separate item within the pipe. We do this by specifying the path to the outlin element in the OPML feed, noting that each journal listing is represented using a separate outline element.

Within the pipes environment, the OPML file is represented as follows:

Each outline element contains information regarding a single journal – it’s title, xmlUrl, and so on. The xmlUrl element contains the URI of the RSS feed for the contents of the current issue of the particular journal. You’ll see that the xmlURI points to the RSS feed of the journal from the publisher’s site.

So for example, the RSS version of the TOCs for the journal The British Journal for the History of Science can be found at http://journals.cambridge.org/data/rss/feed_BJH_rss_2.0.xml.

Now you could of course subscribe to all these journal table of contents feeds simply importing the OPML file into an RSS reader such as Google Reader, but where would the fun be in that? After all, most of the time, I’m not actually that interested in most of the articles in any particular journal. For example, it would be far more efficient (?!) if I was only alerted to articles that were in my subject area. So let’s see how to do that…

The Loop block lets us work with each item in the selected journals feed. Essentially, it says “for each item in a feed, do something to or with that item”. (For each is a really powerful idea in computational thinking. It does pretty much exactly what it says on the tin: for each item in a list, do something with it. In the Yahoo Pipes environment, the Loop block essentially implements for each):

You’ll see that the loop block has a space for adding another block – the block whose functionality will be applied to each element in the incoming feed. As well as placing ’standard’ pipes blocks taken from the blocks menu in a Loop element, you can also use pipes you have created yourself.

If we embed a Fetch Feed block in the Loop, then for each journal item identified in the imported OPML feed, we can locate its TOCs RSS feed URI (the xmlUrl element) and use it to fetch the contents of that feed.

Now you may notice that the Loop block can output the results of the Fetch Feed call in one of two ways; it can either annotate the original feed items, for example by assigning (that is, adding) the current list of contents for a journal to each a subelement of each item in the pipe:

In more abstract terms, we might represent that as follows:

Or byemitting the items, which is to say that each item that comes into the the Loop block is replaced by the set of items that were created within the Loop block:

Here’s how that looks diagrammatically:

Because I want to produce a feed that just contains links to articles that may be of interest to me, we’re going to use the “emit all results” option.

So let’s just recap where we are. Here’s the pipe so far:

We start by taking some user keyword terms and construct a URI that calls the jOPML service, returning an OPML file that contains the titles and TOC RSS URLs of journals related to those keywords. We then loop through that list of journals, replacing each journal item with a list of items corresponding to the current table of contents of each journal. These items are pulled from the table of contents RSS feed for each journal as obtained from the ticTOCs listings.

The next step is to filter the contents list so that we only get passed journal articles on a particular topic. We’ll do that using a crude keyword filter that only lets articles through whose contents contain a particular keyword or set of keywords.

Taking the filter block, we wire in another user input that allows the user to specify keywords that must appear in the title element of an article for it to be emitted from the pipe, and take the output from this filter to the output of the pipe.

So there we have it: a 2D search that takes two sets of keywords, one set that pulls out likely suspect journals on a topic, and the second set that filters articles from those journals on a more detailed subject.

The output form the pipe is then available as an RSS feed in its own right, as a Google personal (iGoogle) widget, etc etc.

The whole pipe looks like this:

It works by generating a jOPML URI based on user provided keyword terms, importing the jOPML feed into the pipe, grabbing the RSS feed of the table of contents for each journal specified in the OPML feed and then filtering those contents listings using another set of keyword terms based on the title of each article.

In doing so, you have seen how to use the URL Builder block to construct the jOPML URI using user provided search terms entered using a Text Input block; the Import Data block to grab the jOPML XML feed; the Loop and Fetch Feed blocks to pull in the table of contents RSS feed from the journal publisher for each journal identified in the jOPML feed; and the Filter block to pass through only those articles that contain a second set of user specified keywords in the article title.

Enjoy :-)

PS if I manage to blag being able to run a Library Mashup uncourse in the Autumn, this is about the level of detail post I’d was planning to write. So – too much detail? Not enough? Just right? How’s it for leveling? Appropriate for a ‘not necessarily techie, but keen to learn’ audience?

At Mash Oop North yesterday, Brian Kelly askd me how I got the “RSS for the content of this page” link onto my (hosted) WordPress blog:

Clicking the link on an arbitrary blog post page turns up an RSS feed containing just a single item: the content of that blog post.

The trick is quite simple, and relies on a couple of things.

The first thing you need to know is that you can get a single item RSS feed containing an RSS version of a single WordPress blog page by adding ?feed=rss2&withoutcomments=1 to the end of the page URL.

So for example, the RSS version of the post that lives here:
http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/2009/07/06/enthusiastic-amateurs-and-overcoming-institutional-inertia/
on Brian’s blog can be found here:
http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/2009/07/06/enthusiastic-amateurs-and-overcoming-institutional-inertia/?feed=rss2&withoutcomments=1

The second thing you need to be aware of is how wb browsers handle links that appear in a web page, and in particular how they handle relative links. Relative links are most easily thought of as links in a web page that do not specify the domain of the link. So for example, on this blog, the domain is ouseful.wordpress.com. Links to posts on OUseful.info look something like the following:

http://ouseful.wordpress.com/2009/07/07/mash-oop-north-pipes-mashup-by-way-of-an-apology/

An absolute way of writing this as a link in a web page would be to write the link in an HTML anchor tag as follows:

<a href=”http://ouseful.wordpress.com/2009/07/07/mash-oop-north-pipes-mashup-by-way-of-an-apology/”>

That is, we specify the domain (http://ouseful.wordpress.com) and the path to the resource as well as the resource page itself.

A relative link would be written as follows:

<a href=”2009/07/07/mash-oop-north-pipes-mashup-by-way-of-an-apology/”>

with the browser filling in the gaps using the domain that the page itself is served from (http://ouseful.wordpress.com).

(For a basic grounding in how browsers handle relative links, see Absolute vs. Relative Paths/Links. If you want the hardcore standards stuff, you should read the original RFC: RFC 1808: Relative Uniform Resource Locators.)

One further thing to know about relative links is that in you use something of the form ?foo=bar in the link (e.g. <a href=”?foo=bar”>), the browser will add the argument to the end of the current page’s URL. So if the page mypage.html being served from http://example.com contains the relative link <a href=”?foo=bar”> that link will actually point to http://example.com/mypage.html?foo=bar.

Putting these two things together (how to create a URI for the single item RSS feed version of a post, and how to construct relative URIs), we are now in a position to add an ‘RSS version of this page’ link to a WordPress blog sidebar.

So, to get the single item RSS feed link, go to the Widgets settings area of your WordPress blog and add a text widget as follows:

Okay, Brian?:-)

Following my total melt-down at Mash Oop North earlier today, (sorry, folks:-( here’s a walkthrough of a Yahoo pipe that I had intended to demonstrate properly…

The context is a feed powered mechanism for tracking new articles in academic journals. The starting point is jOPML, a service created by Scott Wilson that allows you to run a keyword search on the titles of journals whose tables of contents are made available as RSS on ticTOCs and a generate an OPML feed containing the RSS feed URLs for those journal TOCS.

So for example, running a search for science history returns:

with the OPML available here: http://jopml.org/feeds.opml?q=science+history

So let the pipework begin…. First construct the URI to the OPML feed:

For each table of contents RSS URI in the OPML file, grab that table of contents listing:

Now filter the titles those current article results using another set of keyword terms:

So there we have it – a 2D search that takes two sets of keywords, one set that pulls out likely suspect journals on a topic, and the second set that filters articles from those journals on a more detailed subject.

The output from the pipe is then available as an RSS feed in its own right, as a Google personal (iGoogle) widget, etc etc.

PS A fully worked tutorial explaining the operation of this pipe can be found at Mashlib Pipes Tutorial: 2D Journal Search

In Can Data Revitalize Journalism?, an article about the way data can be used to enrich the journalist’s trade [via @paulbradshaw], Frédéric Filloux asks:

What about monetization? Well, first of all, there are already many private entities who make a nice living processing public data. Why not the newsmedia? Take the education market: Why not having editorial products, designed by professional journalists, capitalizing on powerful label such as Le Monde, VG or The Guardian to address this audience with well designed products, in print or online? Think about students, how they could use this new knowledge with their laptops or iPhones. This market is up for grabs. And medias are well positioned to enter it. (Or someone else will.

My gut feeling is that with the news media trying to redefine itself for a future where revenues aren’t guaranteed by ad-sales in daily or weekend papers, and the higher education market (in the UK at least) potentially looking set for a fall in the short term as graduate openings disappear and institutions look for ways to increase student fees, there is an opportunity for a new sort of service provider, perhaps not dissimilar to a professional institution, to take up the slack and provide quality comment, analysis to the media (think: paidContent for the quality papers’ analysis sections, powered by academe redefined (i.e. Academe 2.0;-)); and FE/HE level lifelong training “learning” to whosoever needs it.

When the OU was founded 40 years ago, it opened up access to Higher Education in the UK for those who couldn’t otherwise access it, and opened to doorway for many to membership of a professional institution. One of the driving reasons for the institutions was to keep their members up-to-date with innovations in their profession. However, those institutions have suffered terribly in recent years, (declining numbers of members – you can probably guess the rest…) so maybe it’s time for a rethink…

Indeed, maybe it’s time for something that combines elements of Higher Education, professional institutions and “products” like Guardian Professional (such as their research service, and maybe even the events* part?) wrapped up with some form of verification service that blends elements of professional, academic and maybe even vendor certification?

And maybe data analysis and commentary is one way in to that?

* I keep wondering why it is that Guardian, TED and O’Reilly conferences (as well as a wide variety of unconferences) are of far more interest to me than academic ones? It can’t just be that they tend to publish their audio streams online?;-)

PS see also Guerrilla Education: Teaching and Learning at the Speed of News and its associated comments.

Last week, Steph Gray announced yet another innovative way of trying to engage people in public consultations in his blog post Your starter for ten. The piece describes a scheme in which a series of pub quiz style “killer facts” are pulled out of a current consultation document on consumer rights and credit and then represented in a quiz format along with why you should care/what the consultation is seeking to do to address the issues raised by each quiz question. (You can find the quiz from a link on here: Government action to secure a better deal for consumers.)

This idea, of microchunking particular elements of a consultation and then trying to use these microchunks to draw people into commenting on a consultation document, is one that Joss Winn and I have casually explored in the context of WriteToReply. In that case, we discussed whether or not we should pull out intriguing facts or potentially contentious questions that we could then tweet, along with a link to the appropriate part of the consultation document, in order to entice people into commenting, either directly on the WriteToReply site, or by remote commenting (that is, posting a blog comment or tweet that links back to a particular paragraph on the WriteToReply site site that we can then track via a Trackback).

(As part of this, we imagined creating a list of ‘nuggets’ pulled from consultation docs as we imported them into WordPress; it strikes me now that if we did have such a list, we could set up a twitter account for each consultation that could be run on a ‘daily feeds’ like basis – whenever anyone subscribes, they start to receive tweets @’d to them, according to a personal schedule starting at the moment they follow the consultation, as well as more general broadcast tweets?)

So for example, here are a couple of tweets that we sent out yesterday in support of a new consultation doc on WriteToReply about funding local and regional news (Sustainable independent and impartial news):

One thing to note here is that rathr than linking to the actual paragraph that contains the question, which is what we’d normally do, these tweets link to paragraphs that preview, and provide the context for, the questions. So if you follow the link, you are lead into the body of the consultation document, and if you read on you then come to the question included in the tweet. That is, the tweet provides the question that sets the contest, the link leads through to the part of the consultation that provides the context for the question, and then to the question as it appears in the consultation doc.

Also on Twitter, Joss and I fell into a conversation with Steph and Richard Stirling about the different audiences for consultation docs and what the appropriate means of publication are for those different audiences. So for example, Steph suggested “Consultations have multiple audiences. Suspect downloadable PDFs actually not bad for policy folk. But for public?” [ref], which was backed up by Richard: “I agree with @lesteph’s point. As a policy person I often want to read the whole doc – not sections. PDF works.” [ref].

However, if the aim is to reach outside the policy wonks and the committed lobbiests/interest group members, then I suspect we need smaller ‘headline’ chunks, or atomic parts of the consultation document, to pull people in to the consultation. (Also, we may learn something form the journalists here, and the way they construct stories to lead people in, or at least, give them some of the facts – that is, facts they can misquote in the pub later! – up front.)

There are dangers with the headline approach, of course, as the ’simplistic’ tweeted questions shown above suggest… At the simplest reading, they just solicit a trivial yes/no answer, rather than an informed comment. But bear this in mind too – those questions were taken from the consultation document itself.

A further thing that’s interesting to note is how the consultation document is actually constructed. The ‘argument’, such as it, and the issues that the consultation wishes to be taken into account, are used to preface the actual questions (see the sections on Potential Sources of Top-Up Funding or Protecting the BBC’s Funding for a couple of examples).

That is, some issues a presented, and then the question is asked. But how likely is this to work as an engagement strategy? A cold start conversational strategy would probably be more likely to start with a question, followed by a discussion (or argument) and an agreement to disagree.

So on the WriteToReply “plural news” consultation dashboard, we have started to explore how we can hook people into the consultation, first through a re-presentation of the consultation questions as simple polls:

and also by using the questions to lead in to some of the discussion that actually appears before the questions in the original consultation document:

We’ve also started looking at pulling related news stories in to the dashboard, in the first instance from the Guardian using the Guardian OpenPlatform API, to try and embed the consultation in a wider context:

There is an issue of circularity here, of course – the news reports presented to date stem largely from responses to the original consultation call, so rather than setting the consultation in context, you could argue they are just responses to it.

Cf. also the approach taken particularly on BBC sites where full articles on a government documents are often backed up with a link to the original document:

But we have to start somewhere, and we are, after all, making this stuff up as we go along. If nothing else, we are exploring how to re-balance the presentation of the consultation doc and associated news stories compared to the mode of presentation used by the BBC et al.

And finally (and slightly off topic!), note that we’re also using WordPress feed to pull in both the content of the report and the comments from the WriteToReply republication of the original consultation document:

However, whilst we can pull the content of the report into the dashboard via an RSS feed, the paragraph level links and links and comment links are not passed though the RSS:

(I suspect this is because the linking is managed by the CommentPress theme? Joss – maybe we need to look at adding paragraph and “comment here” links to the RSS content too?)

That is:

PDF, a digital form used to represent electronic documents, allows users to exchange and view the documents easily and reliably, independent of the environments in which they are created, viewed and printed, while preserving their content and visual appearance. [PDF Format Becomes ISO Standard]

No Derivative Works — You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work.

Just by the by, I idly tweeted last week along the lines of “does anyone know of a twitter trends service that identifies trending topics within a particular region or locale?”.

I didn’t receive any links to such a service at the time (and didn’t build the service myself…) but it strikes me that this could be a really useful hyperlocal news service?

An alternative might be to find ‘trending locations’ or ‘trending places’ rather than trending hashtags or topics, so if there is a sudden flurry of tweets in a particular area, it could get flagged (does Twitter this anyway with its trending topics?).

The locus of the trending regions need not be limited to ‘a circle within fifty miles of a point’ either; they could (with lots of computing power;-) be points along a line, such as a road, for example.

As an asymmetric follower type (I have many more followers than people I follow on Twitter), it might also be handy to be able to see trending topics across the people who follow me, just in case the sampled population that I do follow aren’t a fair sample of the people who follow me…

Just a thought… now back to the jet lag :-(

[See also: Mapping Realtime Events on Twitter and this Simple Embeddable Twitter Map Mashup]

One of the really handy things about Youtube is the ability to share bookmarks that “deep link” to a particular point within a video (e.g here’s Google having a dig at Microsoft; the URL? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5aJAaGZIvk#t=29m10s, which should start the video playing 29 minutes 10 seconds in. That is, just add something like #t=29m10s to the end of the Youtube video page URL to start the video playing that far in).

A similar service is offered on podcast material published through the wonderful IT Conversations, that lets you deep link in to a particular part of an audio file, which is great for sharing audio quotes and, err, messing around with: IT Conversations samples trigger pad;-)

Anyway, anyway, yesterday I saw this:

which means you can now deep link in to iPlayer content :-)

As with the Youtube deep linking, if you know the URL pattern, you can can create your own deep links on the fly (just add, ?t=21m45s, for example, on to the end of the URL to start the programme playing 21 minutes 45 seconds in.)

Something else I thought was interesting – the shared link is actually a BBC short link. So for an example, this is the sort of link you are given to share:

http://bbc.co.uk/i/l9n18/?t=13m55s

which then resolves to something like this:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00l9n18/Psychoville_Episode_1/?t=13m55s

I’ve raised the issue before now (in conversation with HEI internet services people, rather than through blog posts, I think?) about whether HEIs should run their own short code services (maybe as a Library service), but it’s always been shot down as being an extra hassle that we don’t need to worry about. (I always saw it as an opportunity for providing a couple of value add services: 1) providing a persistent web identifier that could act like a DOI; 2) providing a level of indirection (as in the case of a DOI) that might help as part of an archiving or “archival redirection” project – e.g. in the case of content moving and URIs changing (because they do change).)

Anyway – it seems as if the BBC think running their own short URI service is a good idea.. It’d also be useful to know if the short URI will permanently map to the same full URI, or whether it will support a more arbitrary form of resolution, e.g. maybe hooking in to services like URIPlay?

PS sort of, but not really, related, see also: Open University Podcasts on Your TV – Boxee App

Over the weekend, a submission went in from The Open University (in particular, from Liam GreenHughes (dev) and some of the OU Comms team Dave Winter in Online Services (design)), to the Boxee application competition (UK’s Open University on boxee).

For those of you who haven’t com across Boxee, it’s an easy to use video on demand aggregator that turns your computer into a video appliance and lets you watch video content from a wide range of providers (including BBC iPlayer) on your TV. Liam’s been evangelising it for some time, as well as exploring how to get OU Podcasts into it via RSS’n'OPML feeds (An OU Podcast RSS feed for Boxee).

(For those of you who prefer to just stick with the Beeb, then the BBC iPlayer big screen version provides an interface optimised for use on your telly.)

As well as channeling online video services, and allowing users to wire in their own video and audio content via a feed feed, Boxee also provides a plugin architecture for adding additional services to your Boxee setup. The recent Boxee competition promoted this facility by encouraging developers to create new applications for it.

So what does the OU Podcasts Boxee app over and above a simple subscription to an OU podcasts feed?

A pleasing, branded experience, that’s what.

So for example, on installing the OU podcasts app (available from the Boxee App Box), an icon for it is added to your Internet Services applications.

Launching the application takes you to an OU podcasts browser that is organised along similar lines to the OU’s Youtube presence, that is, in terms of OU Learn, OU Research and OU Life content. The Featured content area also provides a mechanism for pushing editorially selected content to higher prominence. (Should this be the left-most, default option, I wonder, rather than the OU Learn channel?)

In the Research area, a single level of navigation exists, listing the various episodes available:

Th more comprehensive Learn area organises content into topic basic based themes/episode collections (listed in the right hand panel) with the episodes associated with a particular selected theme or collection displayed in the left hand panel. Selecting an episode in the left hand panel then reveals its description in the right hand panel (as in the screenshot above).

So for example, when we go to the OU Learn area, the Arts and Humanities episodes are listed in the left hand area (by default), and available collections in the right.

We can scroll down the collections and select one, Engineering for example:

Episodes in this collection are listed in the left hand panel, and further subcollections in the right hand panel (it all seems a little confusing to describe, but it actually seems to work okay… maybe?!;-)

Highlighting an actual episode then displays a description of it.

Selecting a program to play pops up a confirmation “play this” overlay, along with a link to further information for the episode:

Both audio and video content can be channeled to the service – selecting a video programme provides a full screen view of the episode, whilst audio is played within a player

The “Read More” option provides a description of the episode, as well as social rating and recommendation options:

Finally, a search tool allows for content to be discovered using user selected search terms,

If you search with an OU course code, and there is video on the OU podcasts site from the course, the search may turn that course related video up…

This wouldn’t be a OUseful post if I didn’t add my own 2p’s worth, of course, so what else would I have liked to have seen in this app. One thing that comes to mind is a seven day catch-up of OU co-pro content that has been broadcast on the BBC (or more generally, the ability to watch all OU co-pro content that is currntly available on the BBC iPlayer). I developed a proof-of-concept demonstrator of how such a service might work on the web, or for the iPhone/iPod Touch (iPhone 7 Day OU Programme CatchUp, via BBC iPlayer), so under the assumption that the Boxee API can provide the hooks you need to be able to play iPlayer content, I’d guess adding this sort of functionality shouldn’t take Liam much more than half-an-hour?!;-)

I also wonder if the application can be used to preserve local state in the form of personalisation information? For example, could a user create their own saved searches – and by default their own topic themed channels? Items in such a feed could also be nominally tagged with that search term back on a central server, if, for example, if a user watched an episode that had been retrieved using a particular search term all the way through?

To vote for the OU Boxee app, please go to: vote for your favorite apps, RSVP for the boxee event in SF.

PS the OU Podcasts app is not the only education related submission to the competition. There’s also OpenCourseWare on boxee, which porvides a single point of entry to several video collections from some of the major US OCW projects.

PPS it also turns out that KMi have a developer who’s currently working on a range of mobile apps for the iPhone/iPod Touch, Android phones and so on. If any OU readers have ideas for compelling OU related mobile apps, you just may get lucky in getting it built, so post the idea as a comment to this post, or contact, err, erm, @stuartbrown, maybe?

PPPS Now I’m not sure how much time was spent on the app, but as the competition was only launched on May 5th, with a closing date of June 14th, it can’t have been that long, putting things like even the JISC Rapid Innovation (JISCRI) process to shame…?!;-)