Coredump

Update: Ka Edong gave me a heads-up on Nox’s mirror of Pinoy Tech Scene. Cool!

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Update: Ka Edong, who has been missing Pinoy Tech Scene, wants to know how OPML works. I don’t know myself, but it’s a convenient way of getting all those blogs in one place. Thanks to Migs, I’ve come upon OPtiMaL, a web-based OPML browser — just feed it the URL to the OPML file, and voila! you’ve got your own aggregator.

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The Pinoy Tech Scene aggregator is currently down — a blank page shows up on http://techscene.free.net.ph. For those who want the OPML, you can get it from Jan Alonzo, here. Or grab it here.

I’ve also posted the OPML for Ubuntu-PH Planet.

Here’s an expansion of my previous post on the ICT caravan. Incidentally, I’ve blogged about it in our very aptly named “PFI Blog“. (Heh. We’ll think of a sexier name, promise.)

The Caravan, which will run from March to April, will feature the following:

• Cyber farm forum (multisite videoconferencing)
• Rice science and technology updates
• Agricultural videos
• Introduction to computers and the internet
• Pinoy Farmers’ Internet
• Enrolment in the Open Academy’s Virtual Classroom
• Text messaging for farming tips
• Experts online
• Rice Knowledge Bank
• Other important agricultural websites
• Online trading and real-time price watch of agricultural products
• Knowledge products for sale
• Maps and directories
• Last-mile connectivity solutions
• Open source software

More details in the website.

Very busy with the Open Academy for Philippine Agriculture. We are organizing an “ICT caravan”, a road tour of sorts that will span the archipelago (naks!), to spread ICT and IT-based agriculture knowledge to extension workers. This will happen in March.

The caravan will have five legs: Ilocos region, Southern Tagalog, Bicol region, Northern Mindanao, and Davao provinces. Five buses from the DOST SEI (their Mobile ICT classroom) will be equipped with internet connection — either through WeRoam or via WiFi in nearby internet cafes — and travel to different municipalities where one-day training on basic computer skills will be held.

We’re currently looking for sponsors — we’re eyeing local government agencies and telcos — to cover part of the costs. The Pinoy Farmers Internet will feature a day-to-day journal of the caravan. We will be assigning bloggers per team so they can post images and thoughts on the web. We will be teaching extension workers to blog, too, and how to use our wiki.

I’m thinking of using my stillborn Google Maps API-enabled AgriInfo map to set out the route and provide some interesting points as part of our coverage. Right now, I’m working on a decent XML generator to plug in the geodata with the resulting RSS feeds from the blog posts. I can then use the resulting XML to map out points (or routes) using the Google Maps API. (I know, I may be talking through my butt here — there might be a simpler way — but right now, I’m inclined to follow this approach. Either that or use a Drupal flexinode feed.)

Moving in to this host, courtesy of a very cool guy. Thanks, Ramil!

Lately, I’ve been reduced to link blogging, instead of writing full-blown treatments of things I want to blog about.

Call it laziness or whatever, but I’ve been hooked to tagging! I pass through an interesting site, I invoke my bookmarklet shortcut for posting to del.icio.us, jot down a note about it, then I’m off to another link. The result: lots of del.icio.us bookmarks and not enough substantial reading. And it’s disturbing. I’m addicted to meta. Ack!