Nick @ Education.au

me.edu.au seems to have had a pretty good response, with lots of useful feedback coming in.

A small disclaimer: this only represents my opinions, not necessarily the opinions of the whole me.edu.au team at education.au. Any time I say I’d like me.edu.au to include a feature it means only that -I’d like it to. As a team we have to make hard decisions about how best to deploy limited resources - we need to choose which bugs to fix, which feature requests to implement, and which new services to add to me.edu.au. Your feedback helps us in making those choices, because without it we just do what we think we should do, and frankly - you are in a better position than us to decide what would help you best.

Now that’s out of the way…

Firstly, my post on RSS & APML support produced a number of comments. The most common request was RSS support for communities. To me this seems like a sensible thing to support, and I don’t see any problems in getting it implemented.

Also related to communities was Kerrie’s post on making online communities work. Kerrie’s correct - building vibrant communities is very important. We see me.edu.au as primarily a way to network with other individual educators - it’s all about me! me.edu.au communities are designed to me much more “lightweight” than edna groups, and really grew out of the work we did in an edna proof-of-concept project we did early in 2007 around community forming around tags in social bookmarking system. However, we don’t expect what we have now to be the final version. For instance, we are addressing some of the issues we see in the groups user interface. The next release - in early January - will re-organise the tag cloud to take into account the number of links and messages in each community instead of just the number of people.

Graham Wegner wrote a nice post about his introduction to me.edu.au. In the comments on that post there’s an interesting discussion about whether me.edu.au is a “walled garden” or not. My view is that it isn’t - it’s true that you need to register to use it, but apart from that we’ve been very aggressive in a policy of embracing the internet. We’re not in a position to replicate all the useful tools around - our vision for me.edu.au is to try to draw attention to the ways people are using those tool.

John Larkin wrote a thoughtful comment in response to Graham’s post, too. It’s worth reading, but to respond to some of the issues raised:

• Image resize issue: Yes, it’s a bug, and should be fixed in the next release (we’ll use the 100×100 image on the full page).
• Fractured communities based on misspellings: Yes, it’s an issue we are aware of. We hope the suggestions (as you type on the edit interests screen), along with the improvements to the community browse screen (see above) will help this.
• Feed addresses that start with “feed://”: I’m not too keen about supporting this actually. The “feed:” uri scheme is a non-standard extension, which breaks a significant number of browsers. Postel’s Law says we should support it, but I think its a fairly low priority. I think it is more important to support feed auto-discovery so when someone enters a url for a blog it will discover the RSS feed.

Finally, Mike Seyfang points to his Web2ools community - I think he’s looking for some feedback.