Today I had two different graduate students come to me with ideas for blog-related graduate capstone projects (an alternative to theses for our students). How cool is that?
It looks like the first one is going to work on multiple authoring issues associated with Movable Type. Ideally, I’d like a way to create an MT blog that has almost Wiki-like “add yourself as an author” capability. I’d also like a way to easily select among “simple” and “advanced” editing/authoring interfaces. Anybody know of things already happening in this arena?
The second is going to work on a kids’ interface to MT blogging. My 8yo, Lane, has expressed interest in blogging—but the standard MT entry environment is not particularly kid-friendly. I’d like a kid-focused interface that keeps things really simple, preferably integrating some of the functionality that plug-ins like MT-Textile offer, but also giving a UI that’s really kid-friendly (and kid-tested).
After too many years of supervising yet-another-ecommerce-project, it is incredibly exciting to have students who want to work on the things I really care about. And because our students take classes in everything from programming to database to HCI, we have an incredible opportunity to turn them loose on the LazyWeb and have what they do help the larger social software community.
I’ve waited a long, long time to get to a point where my personal and professional interests intersected so well, and in a way that has long-term professional potential. I have to keep pinching myself these days. :-)
On the not-quite-such-good-news front, my cholesterol test results came back, and it looks like it’s a very good thing that I’ve made myself publicly accountable on the exercise front. Need to change the diet, too, it seems. <sigh>
So I’m probably the last to know that CNN war correspondent Kevin Sites has a blog. But just in case, I’m mentioning it anyway.
Funny how the “audblog” post that he called in from the Iran/Kurdistan border strikes me as so much more compelling than a comparable report on CNN itself would be.
The personal nature of blogging, I think, fundamentally changes our relationship to the content. It’s all about voice, of course. In his blog, it feels like Kevin is talking to me. I don’t feel that way about mass media journalism.
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