Hmm, is there a meta category?

So, I've committed to undertaking a couple CNTV-IMD web related projects during the upcoming year and would be interested in getting some feedback on what types of site improvement/collaborative tools would be useful...

The three main things I'm planning on working on this semester is:

• Improving the IM blog
• Calendar sharing
• Knowledge Base tool

I'm open, however to spending time working on other things if anyone thinks there's a big need. Would be interested in hearing what kind of collaboration tools would be most useful to the CNTV-IMD community.

Hmm, so I'll just hit each of these points separately. Since the IMblog has been pretty neglected, now that I have some time I'm just going to start working on improvements (unless anyone has any objections).

Most of these changes can be seen in a comp that Scott asked me to do last summer:

• 'Last Updated' blogroll - I just implemented a preliminary version on the left column of my IMblog. Basically, allowing one to see at a glance when a blog has been recently updated. Good for those who aren't using feed-readers/notification services; Hopefully, this will make it easier to keep up with what everyone's writing.
• Multi-blog aggregation - the idea here is instead of posting multiple posts into say class blogs, the front page blog, etc., everyone can just post into their own blog, and then select (my feeling is that this can simply be done by category mapping) which other blogs they wish their posts to go to. What's fun about this is that in theory, all kinds of groupings could be done, like say a '1st year' or '2nd year' blog, and of course that changes will propagate and everything's all well normalized.
• Various MT plugins. Say, better text entry via MT-Textile or Smarty Pants, and something like MTThreadComments for better commenting.
• Blogs are good for entering into, not as good for reading en-masse, keeping up on comments, etc within a community. If there's time/motivation, I may try dinking on some ideas I have on improving those aspects.

I've been giving a lot of thought to the pubsub calendaring problem. The main problem is that there's no industry standard for calendar synchronization (the closest is SyncML/Jabber w/ xCal, but it's all pretty much dead in the water). Without a real way of things to talk to each other, we're left with some almost-there solutions. But, something is probably better than nothing.

• pub/sub iCalendars - thanks primarily to Apple, uni-directional calendar publishing and subscription (WebDAV, HTTP) has made some headway. Besides iCal, both Mozilla Calendar and Evolution support this now, so in theory every platform is covered. Sync everything up to phpMyCal, write some custom handlers with separate 'entry' and 'subscription' calendars, and you have an 80% solution
• thoughts? can continue discussion offline if anyone has anything substantive to add. there are certain tricky issues with all of this, especially with handling event editing, clearing the entry calendars, etc

Umm, my fingers are tired... I'm probably not going to get around to working on the KB tool until the summer or later anyway, but the basic idea is to create segmentable, multi-faceted, semi-self-organizing graph structures. Oh, that will be as easy if not easier to enter data into than blogging.