It is great to be here at Athabasca University, surrounded by the great and the good in e-learning, and very nice to be back blogging with a nice shiny new version of Elgg.
But now I have a problem: where do I blog?
Issues of aggregation and the newly popular term the social graph have been plaguing me for years but, by and large, it is easy enough to move from one platform to another and the pain has been bearable. The problems were seldom technical: essentially the decision was about where I wanted to call home. But now I have two homes and this leads to an interesting problem of synchronisation. I have started the process of importing a feed from my Brighton blog into this site, which itself imports a feed from my CoFIND system. If I were feeling really brave, I would add a feed from here to Brighton, but then there is a danger of an endless loop that will eventually lead to my blog posts taking over the entire virtual universe (or at least toppling a server or two and leaving me with a very messy clean-up job). Or would the Elgg servers be smart enough to recognise duplicates? My suspicion is that they would not, having already experienced Elgg importing the same posts many times. This is the kind of experiment that should be done in a controlled environment.
