Edublogs - services based on open source software

September 26th, 2006

VIA - Edufilter
I have been following the famous James Farmer blog for a couple of years now as well as the progress of his highly successful Edublogs. I thought this would be the perfect highlight session to get back into the swing of things here on Edufilter.

From the Edublogs site:

“Free blogs for teachers, trainers, lecturers, librarians, and other edu professionals”

I caught up with James to ask him a few questions:

What prompted you to set up Edublogs and subsequently the rest of the blogs in the incsub.org suite?

Um, playing No, more seriously, pretty much the first idea I had after getting a blog was “So how do I sort these out for students”. Actually I lie, that was a thought I had even before I started blogging - I recall a pretty horrific attempt to set up Manila in 2002. Edublogs just seemed like a natural progression - I grabbed the domain sometime in early 05 I think, pretty surprised to see it was available… played around with a few possible uses of it - Drupal etc. and then, over a few glasses of wine, had as close to a eureka moment as I can ever claim to have had…. that this new multi user blogging thing that I was playing with at incsub could be a source for edublogs… not much of a revelation I know but it’s kinda shaped where I am now more than I could have imagined at the time!

The uptake rates seem pretty impressive - has it been meeting your expectations?

Exceeding them at the moment, it’s scary. To be honest I really want to bring all the sites together to one page, brand the themes a bit (a cutesy little button a la ‘I power blogger’) and doing some serious promotion… but until I can get some serious enterprise architecture / scalability and work on it I’m kinda scared to do that. It’ll be fun when I can though. I think I estimated (thinking it’d be wildely optomistic something like 9k blogs in a year - and there were more than double that on edulogs.org alone.)

Across the various services, have you notice any trends occurring; frequency of posting, feature requests - that sort of thing?

I wish I had the time to get more into it, I really do. Overall people are pretty happy with the services but I’m itching to introduce all sorts of cool new stuff.

Do you have any plans to expand the range of services you offer and what can users of Edublogs expect to see in the future?

Yes, absolutely. First up I want to make it a much richer, stronger and more featureful system. Secondly integration with fantastic tools like wikispaces and yacapaca are just great. Thirdly… well, if I get to pull that off it’ll be a nice surprise, so I won’t tell you just yet

What effect do you see DOPA, if it goes through, having on services like Edublogs?

Very little, if at all, I hope.

How do you fund Edublogs?

Chalkface have provided some great support but fundamentally it’s outta my own pocket. The hardware technical costs at the moment are about $10k a year - which hurts - but I’m hopeful that it’ll be worth it down the line - I guess in many ways it has already. I’d rather not think about the cost in terms of my own time and stress levels, it hurts too much

Edublogs is powered by WordPress, are there any other technologies behind the service?

Yep, bbPress runs the forums and is integrated with the user database (I can’t tell you how hard that was!) Wikispaces is, well, wikispaces and Yacapaca is a great assessment tool run by Chalkface. WordPress is about the closest I’ve ever come to software nirvana though, I couldn’t recommend it more.

Entry Filed under: Social Software