BudGibson.com

Twenty years ago, I graduated with an MBA from the Wharton School. I went there because it was the best school I could get into.  Also, I was impressed with some of the people I had met from there.

The fact that I would have to reside in Philadelphia was a drawback. I paid to live in the dorms there because I did not want to have to brave the rough neighborhood that surrounded the school. Homicides occurred at the dormitory door. It might be best to consider having to live in Philadelphia as part of the cost of attending.

Universities are going through a tough time financially. People no longer have to attend them to get the credentials they need. People inside universities think they are selling an experience and that people are turning away from that. I think universities were always selling credentials.

They're just not the only place to get them any more.

(n.b., this essay was inspired by a conversation with Patricia Anderson)

Three weeks ago, Linda Girard and Catherine Juon over at Pure Visibility convinced me to start Tweeting on Twitter. It's been sort of fun, but I find I mainly do it when I am extremely busy otherwise. If I'm not busy, I do it less.

A few general observations about Twitter's utility:

• It's been a great tool for keeping up with happenings around Ann Arbor. I've certainly learned a lot more about the people at Pure Visibility who are all on Twitter.
• I've managed to reach out to other people who I knew in past lives, and that has been fun.
• In the preceding two cases, I'd categorize everyone as part of the digerati. My personal trainer is not on twitter. None of my gym pals are on Twitter. The Dean of the school where I teach is not on Twitter, nor will he ever be.
• The chief question on my mind is the extent to which twitter's mainly digierati crowd can provide me with generally applicable information. One point in favor of twitter is that I have learned alot of things about Ann Arbor I never knew, and I've been here a decade. So, it's been at least a little worth it.

On Friday, I posted a note to the Sixapart Pronet mailing list to the effect that I need the following functionality in Movable Type's search feature:

I am doing a global tag search on my MT4 blog, and the entries are coming out sorted by blog. Is there a way to get them sorted by entry date alone?

I had put in a lot of work customizing search templates and just wanted a solution that would give me entries sorted by date without reference to blog. The idea is that students will have their own blogs with a central aggregation blog holding a list of their entries and organizing them by tag. Tags are used to organize conversations that students carry on in their posts. Think of it as a sort of mini-Technorati without the SPAM. I call it the Learning Remix project

Well, I had a number of responses. Mark Carey suggested his fast search plug-in for MT4. It appears to work well and solves a number of problems. However, two things caused me to remove it from immediate consideration:

1. I would have had to learn some specifics about how this plug-in worked. They're not too bad and probably worth it if you want the functionality, but I'm really feeling under pressure with some deadlines.
2. I would have had to do some more, albeit perhaps light, template work.

After reviewing this plug-in, I suggested I would be willing to pay for a drop in plug-in that would just sort tagged entries without respect to which blog they were in. In enters Nemui Ailin. Nemui suggested he could develop a quick plug-in, would I be willing to pay $20. We agreed the price with the condition that the plug-in be released under the artistic license that Perl is released under.

I comssioned it for open source because I want others to be able to do the sort of thing I'm doing with Movable Type. I'll be making a page for the plug-in on the learningremix domain shortly. In the mean time, Nemui has made it available for download here.

BTW, Nemui is located in Germany. I paid him via paypal. Welcome to global sourcing on an individual scale. I'm highly satisfied. The whole experience once we got started took well under 24 hours.

I'm not entirely happy with MT4 but it is not vomitous either. It brings a number of improvements but also has rough edges. I've had to spend a lot of time debugging sometimes broken functionality.

Maybe the thing that irritates me the most is Sixapart's, the software maker's, utter failure to address the higher education market. Here's a text of a letter I sent to the product manager this morning:

All through this beta process, I had been anticipating *upgrading* my higher ed. classroom license to build and extend a blogging knowledge network I had run under various guises, starting in 2004 and most recently with some donated plugins from Tim Appnel. This year, we're adding automated social network analysis, an exciting feature.

Well, 6A quietly DISCONTINUED the higher ed classroom product I had been using when they went to MT4. I now have to complete a whole formulary stating that I want a higher ed license for the classroom and wanting to know if others are interested.

http://www.movabletype.com/download/contact-us-education.html

Wasn't sure how exactly to address [the question on the form of] who else might be interested, given the apoplexy I was experiencing as I filled it out.

My simple message is this: If you want wider adoption, lower the barriers to adoption. If you are offering a product, sell it like a product with clear value for money. That means for $X you get Y. Just let people make their decision and move on.

Personally, given the hours I have had to spend debugging key components of the software (CAPTCHA with incorrect error message, any kind of install on RHEL5) and the time I expect to spend in further development (custom search template for tag aggregation), I suspect I am a pure MTOS customer.

This custom licensing nonsense has just got my goat.

Bud