intertwingly

It’s just data

Atom and Land-Grant Universities


At the request of Kevin Gamble, I gave a presentation today to the Extension Committee on Organization and Policy (ECOP) of the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges (NASULGC).  The latter being a consortium of 75 colleges.  The former having recently deciding to standardize on Atom 1.0 for the content aggregation system that they are working on.

The whole thing was done via Breeze and VOIP.  I sat at a Mac with a web-cam, and shared my Firefox window.  I’ve been told that about 40 locations participated (presumably with many locations only consisting of a single person), which  was viewed as good given both the technical nature of the presentation, and the timing (it is the first week of school in many places).

My slides are all online, they represent an update of a previous presentation.  During the call there was a live chat running that I could use to field questions.  Many I answered on the spot, for others, I asked for a transcript to be sent to me so that I could share the answers.  One that I recall was a question about how to indicate that a feed isn’t to be indexed, and I said I would have to look up the specifics as spelling is important.  In any case, the name of the namespace is urn:atom-extension:indexing, and the name of the attribute is index.  While it is not standardized, ad-hoc, and all that, it might be useful.  (Of course, if you really want your data private... you might want to reconsider putting it out on the Internet without any authentication required to access it :-))

When I get the transcript of the remaining questions, I’ll either update this post, or simply append the answers as a comment.

Other than an initial glitch where the sound level of my mike had to be re-calibrated, everything went smoothly.