OpenDock Project Weblog

We're great fans of the Creative Commons system for denoting open content licensing. In educational settings especially, the simplicity of CC licensing can cut through a lot of silly obstacles to sharing.

We've now made it very easy to add Creative Commons licensing to knotes weblog content. There are new links in the Manage sidebar for managing a CC license (you need manage role on a weblog to see that sidebar).

I've added Creative Commons licensing for the content in this weblog. See the sidebar near the bottom left ( screenshot at the right of this entry). I chose the Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 license. It is easy to change this choice if you have manager role in the weblog. Details / how-to are in the KNotations blog entry linked to above.

I just added a 'Feed Manager' for the RSS from our del.icio.us tag "opendock"; this makes a special sidebar render out with live updates of the RSS. See the del.icio.us/tag/opendock sidebar near the bottom of the left-hand side for the latest 10 items tagged 'opendock' in del.icio.us. Mike, Alan and at least one other person have been using this tag for some time. del.icio.us is a social-bookmarking service which makes it very quick and easy to collect and tag links. Because of its massive user-base, it can reveal very interesting systems effects based on actions like 'who else collected this link?'. If you are not yet using it, I very heartily recommend it.

Live RSS embedding is one of the many "loosely-coupled web" features of knotes, the open-source weblogging and discussion system which KnowNet has been slaving away at for the past year or so. We've just in the past week completed core work on knotes, so we're eager to make use of its powerful features :o) Another very important feature of knotes is its support for a few simple standards - APIs for editing the weblog remotely, for automatically generating links back to content that links into its content, for auto-discovering these API hooks, and for embedding creative-commons licenses. We also deliver very rich "filecasting" RSS feeds. See the bottom left "subscribe" sidebar for more RSS/atom options.

For instance, I am writing this post in "ecto", a weblog-editing API desktop application, rather than from within the site itself. This means that I can paste the screenshots directly into the entry without having to turn them into web images, and also exposes many, many other features which I choose as a user. It also provides an extra hinge point for APIs... for instance via ecto plugins I can easily attach files which turn into bit-torrents when they reach the server, or geo-tag my entries with locations in google earth, even though neither of those are features of knotes itself. It also makes it easy to do one stop tagging - making tags from mutliple sources available for associating with the entry.

I include a screenshot of me typing this entry (see above; click to see full-size screenshot).