Thanks to Dave Weinberger, for the link to LJBook which again demonstrates in spades the kind of joyful experimentation that keeps surfacing in this Networked World.
One of my favourite projects from this year's education category in the Stockholm Challenge is Writing Workshop in which children and teenagers from all over Brazil have written more than 175,000 unique storybooks and newspapers in virtual collaboration with famous illustrators and cartoonists. The outcome is a printed book, evidence of the work and the collaboration between the kids and the artists. I think its an excellent idea, and on the same lines, LJBook is another.
All you have to do is give the site your login access and it will convert the XML content to a PDF book for you, free and in less than 5 minutes. The file is kept on their site for half an hour and then deleted.
I took one look at it and hopped out of my skin. What a brilliant tool for taking the journal form and preserving it as printed text, but much more exciting is that they enable you to upload an XML file and have that converted as well.
How about a teacher or lecturer wanting to hand out the their latest musings on the subject, with or without comments, or what about students publishing their assignments as Blog entries then printing them when the work is done. At the moment it doesn't work with Typepad (I've asked them to get together and make it happen) but I could always do it via Awasu and use the RSS feed as the source.
That way too, I should be able to specify a category of posting as well so that I only get the entries that relate to the topic at hand.
Most of all, this is exactly the kind of thing I've been blathering on about here Dave Weinberger Points to an Indexer. Scroll down to the wish list. Well LJBook is right in that space, taking a feed and using it to produce a printable document. Now all I need is another converter to make PowerPoint slides of the Blog entries, or convert a feed to a self-contained website. And most of all I need a good information management tool that lets me find, cut, paste, drop, drag and link information from anywhere to produce that feed for the various applications to offer up in their native format.
Getting closer, more fun to be had by all.
Ask and ye shall receive: http://channels.lockergnome.com/rss/archives/software/010530.phtml
:-)
Posted by: Taka | June 01, 2004 at 03:45 AM