April 2005 Archives

I have been casting around for a name for what we are trying to do with talkeuro and settled on "Social Documents". This represents what we are trying to do, take static documents, often released as PDFs, and put people having a conversation back into them. Though we are using a weblog platform to build talkeuro, it is not a weblog, nor is it a normal website with only limited interaction. A definition will help…

"A Social Document encourages direct engagement with the content of the document. It provides the means of discussion itself, enabling people's commentary and placing it alongside the document on a section by section basis. Those reading the document can therefore read the content and the opinions of those reading before them."

• Movabletwiki - Movabletype and twiki cleanly integrated
  looks very nice, a good way to manage wikis
  (tags: wiki twiki movabletype movabletwiki)
• New Scientist 13 things that do not make sense
  interesting series of things that cannot be explained
  (tags: space physics newscientist)

• BBC NEWS | Election 2005 | Poll Tracker
  poll tracker and swingometer for the uk election
  (tags: ukelection2005 poll swing bbc)
• TWiki . Main . AutoGenerateMovableTypeIndex
  perl code to force regeneration of templates in MT when there is no new post or other parameter to force rebuild
  (tags: movabletype cron template rebuild)

Check watch, it is after 12, right lets launch following yesterdays debacle with power failure, TextDrive were great through it.

Well, I'm really pleased and excited to say that talkeuro is finally live, the first two languages (French and English) of the European Constitution are up on the site. On talkeuro, the intention it to allow Europeans to explore, discuss and understand their constitution. I've written about it on O'Reillynet in connection with the presentation Mark and I did at Etech.

I've been helped by a host of great people to get the site live (in no real order) Rod McLaren; Etienne Pollard; Stefan Magdalinski; James Stewart; Lucy Serpell; Ben Hammersley; Mark Simpkins;Charles Collicutt; Tom Loosemore;Dave Green; Anno Mitchell; Richard Sandford; Tom Steinberg; James Cronin; Murray Walker plus the development communities of Mediawiki, MovableType and TextDrive.

Much more next week on this, we have lots of ideas on how to represent the engagement coming from the users of the site, but what talkeuro need most is users, comments and your thoughts.