It is a gray rainy day in Connecticut. By December standards it is warm but by any other standard it is cold and dreary. I rest on the couch. In a few hours, I will drive down to Virginia to pick up my two older daughters from college. Before that, I will go to the technology committee meeting at my local school. Our large orange Maine Coon Cat curls up next me, seemingly approving of my decision to nap during the day.

Road trips can be fun, seeing new things on a leisurely drive, but this trip will be done in the dark and won’t be particularly leisurely. The trip back is likely to be much more fun as my daughters and I catch up.

I expect my time online will be fairly sparse for the next couple of days, but I still hope to get a little content up each day.

With that, it seems like a good opportunity to post an email that I had sent to a mailing list of educators that use Second Life for education. One person had started compiling a list of blogs about Second Life, and another person suggested there must be a more Web 2.0-ish way of gathering the list, something like tags in delicious, a wiki, etc. I wrote my response, which was well received, and I’ve been meaning to add it to my blog for sometime. Since the content is sparse right now, and the email fits nicely with some discussions about the technology committee, here is my snarky response:

With a more technologically savvy group there might be a more 2.0-ish way. But even with that you would probably need lots of communication ahead of time to deterime which tag to use. Then, to reach out to people, would probably need to explain what del.icio.us is, how to sign up, how to tag your own blog, or other resources you find valuable.

Then the discussion would drift to how to use the feed from del.icio.us, how to add it as a blog roll on one's on blog, how to important into various blog reader software, like bloglines or Google Reader. A side discussion explaining what RSS is and how feed readers work would evolve. Someone would ask for a feed reader in Second Life and a minor religous war between BlogLines users and Google Reader users would ensue.

This would probably start a discussion about OPML, which would need further explanations and start off yet another minor religious war over protocols and open source. Someone would be bound to point out hacks to get del.icio.us feeds available as OPML. Others would point out that ma.gnolia.com already supports exporting OPML and uses OpenID and hence would be a much better solution than del.icio.us. Others would then complain about OpenID being too complicated and not widely adopted. Others would point out that Yahoo, Google, Microsoft and AIM among others are starting to support OpenID. OpenID purists would point out that Microsoft's OpenID is only in testing right now, and that Google is running weird modifications to OpenID that makes it not really true OpenID and probably unlikely to work with ma.gnolia

A side discussion would evolve about OpenID, Second Life and OpenSim. A hard core geek would point out a hack to make Second Life and/or OpenSim appear as an OpenID provider. Then there would be a discussion about services working as an OpenId provider and not an OpenID consumer. Someone would set up an Away message and the thread would get diverted once again.

Somewhere in the middle of this, someone would say that they've already built a pretty good list, and if people would just email their URLs they would add it to the list and be done with all of it. This would lead into a discussion about using email to accomplish a task versus using more 2.0-ish ways. A meta discussion would ensue....

RINSE, REPEAT

Enjoy! More when I get back.