Thursday, May 28th, 2009...9:26 am
The Wire (pre alpha) – aggregate blog posts and comments
Yesterday was one of those great open source days for me. The idea that there is a global community of smart and creative people who share ideas openly and help each other is powerful, but also a little abstract. But when you reach out, and the community responds and makes it all happen, it’s a wonderful experience that reaffirms the possibility of togetherness. That’s how I felt when The Wire moved from an abstract idea to pre-alpha. Putting the love aside for a second, let’s get to business.
Thanks to Jim Groom and Joss Winn and Hans Poldoja (neither one is in the picture) for conversations about a combined blog-aggregator/discussion-forum that would be really useful to follow the kinds of disaggregated discussions that take place in many open education courses (like this one, this one, or this recent Mozilla/Creative Commons one). It’s one of those things, that we all felt was so obviously useful that it just had to exist … but it didn’t. So with a little help from my friends (and some new friends) we built it, in one day.
The Wire (pre-alpha) is a simple way of keeping track of what’s going
on in a course discussion. It’s like a content stream that aggregates
discussions which take place across many blogs. When readers click on
the post or comment headings, they are taken straight to the original
blogs. What neat about is that it brings together posts and their comments.
This version is built with google forms, yahoo pipes, a bit of open standards and you can roll your own in an hour or less (or much less if you are Tony Hirst). An example is at http://p2pu.pbworks.com/Wire, a pbwiki site we have been using for some peer 2 peer university tech prototyping.
Here is how it works. I created a google form that collects feed URLs. The form is embedded into the wiki page, which looks like this:
A yahoo pipe then collects the list of feeds via the CSV interface for google spreadsheets (Publish as a web-page, then select CSV). Here is what the link looks like: http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=rkfTjEyTRbZlaJS6URg8CbA&output=csv
The pipe fetches all blog posts and all comments and does some fancy sorting to make sure it all comes out in the right order. A huge thanks to Hapdaniel “The Pickled Piper” whose yahoo pipes wizardry pulls it all together. You can get the pipe and improve it here.
If you go to the site, you can try adding your feed URL and watch it get added to The Wire (sometimes yahoo pipes needs a few moments).
It’s far from perfect and I’ll be spending more time on design aspects and various other bits. If you want to help, please leave a comment or get in touch by email.
Voila – thanks everyone for the ideas and the help, and really making my day. Hapdaniel, you rock! And special mention to my friend Tau Tavenga for introducing me to this Wire
12 Comments
May 28th, 2009 at 10:10 am
How awesome, this is so very cool. Now here is an added idea that may make this even sicker. Add your blog url and an additional tag you will be using so that the Wire only includes posts and comments that have this unique tag. Then you have some impressive aggregated filtering disco
May 28th, 2009 at 10:32 am
[...] Schmidt just posted on a cool new mashup of Google Forms, and Yahoo Pipes that creates a kind of self-service [...]
May 28th, 2009 at 10:56 am
As a follow-up, I added two to three URLs to the pre-alpha version in the spirit of testing—just so you know
May 28th, 2009 at 11:32 am
[...] Schmidt has developed a way to aggregate both posts and comments inline. Read more about it on Philip’s blog. Jim Groom’s posted about it, too. I have to run to a meeting soon, but I just wanted to show [...]
May 28th, 2009 at 4:23 pm
This is brilliant in idea and use of off the web shelf tools. Love the Wire and The Wire.
May 28th, 2009 at 5:27 pm
This is exciting stuff… nice work, Philip & crew!
Down the line, we need to figure out how to get more people on board with a “roll your own” mentality, and/or pull together some dead-simple tutorial action… I feel the desire to evangelize!
If I built an iPhone app that could search for the college/university feeds that were all about campus visit opportunities, at this point I’d get the little spinning search wheel of death… nobody’s rolling those feeds. At least I don’t think they are.
Which force is stronger, do you think, the pull or the push? Folks working to figure out better homegrown aggregation & eduglu are at this point often trying to aggregate content that is waaaaay off the radar of the folks in mobile development who are furiously trying to figure out how to push the latest line-dancing mortgage rate ad in front of our eyeballs. I’m interested in that gap.
(And are you on Twitter, Philip? Couldn’t tell from your blog. I’m @butwait, and just starting to groove on the possibilities of smarter aggregation.)
May 28th, 2009 at 7:21 pm
@butwait:
I am @sharingnicely on twitter. Thanks for the friendly feedback. I much agree on the need for quick and snappy tutorials to make it easier for others to adopt these tools. It’s actually not very complicated anymore to do so, but to get mainstream education on board some of the complexity still needs to be taken out – and the edges rounded nicely. I am a pull person, but don’t really know much about push, except that it hasn’t worked for me in personal communication.
May 29th, 2009 at 2:18 am
If this is what I think it is, I want to buy you a drink. Or several.
May 29th, 2009 at 10:29 am
@brian: Careful what you post here. I am coming to Open Edu in August to take you up on it.
August 6th, 2009 at 11:25 am
[...] level of participation and keep learners focused. We are also experimenting with something called The Wire, which will make it easier to keep track of the disaggregated discussion – and combining the two [...]
August 12th, 2009 at 12:27 am
[...] Philipp Schmidt’s Yahoo Pipes mashup “The Wire” [...]
August 12th, 2009 at 10:37 am
[...] Schmidt’s Yahoo Pipes mashup “The Wire” Browse Older: Axis as the CourseIs the idea true that as long as there are courses, semesters, [...]