Well, it looks like Dave Winer is serious. Note the following from the Yahoo Manila Developers Group that he just started:
I want all sites to be news item oriented, unless the user specifically opts for a non NIO site. Unfortunately most of the themes we have go the wrong way. I want them to be news item oriented because:
1. All the other blogging tools, Radio, Blogger, Moveable Type, etc are NIO.
2. The nice editing tools and the blogging APIs are also NIO.
3. A lot of the complexity of Manila melts away with NI orientation.
I’m thinking some serious development of templates that would lessen some of the configs I currently have to make. And then there’s this:
So, after I get the theme done, I’m not totally done yet. I’ve budgeted about a week for a new page for managing your weblog posts, that works much like the “desktop website home page” in Radio, or the main editing interface of Blogger. I don’t like the way Moveable Type does it, while they have lovely graphics, there are too many steps in creating a weblog post, their interface is klunky. I like simplicity, transparency.
Now we’re getting somewhere…no more News–Create News Item–Post to Home Page stuff? And did he say the “S” word. Hallelujah! Question now is should we all pony up with our Wish List for Manila for educators? I mean he IS doing this all for Harvard…we should at least be in on the potential trickle down.
And on another note, he gives props out to Bryan Bell and his truly magnificent Kern site. (This is what I’m going to shoot for here.) But here is the really scary part…Bryan says:
This completes the transition to Manila™ we started 2 years ago. The homepage was last on the list, because we decided to do it back to front. We converted every department in the organizations and nearly all of our client schools. I must have trained 300 people on how to manage their Manila™ site.
Ahem…I’ve got some work to do…
Yes, that getting stuff done in the face of rigorous passivity is pretty hair-raising, but Will I think the scariest part of that quote is that he had trained 300 people on managing their websites. I see Kern sites mostly used as syllabus repositories and assignment pages; web sites as classroom management tools not as learning tools. So he’s trained 300 people, where is the student work. This is an observation Pat made in a blogchat the other night. I had been marveling at the Kern site, but now I think I was just dazzled (it is dazzling isn’t it?)by the gorgeous sheen. Maybe I need to check it out some more, but don’t get sucked into the administrative frame here. You want to be where the friction is, where it gets hot, right on the classroom floor. That’s only my opinion, I could be wrong.