I’ll bet the source of the “simplest thing that could possibly work” meme is Ward Cunningham’s ancient (1995) definition of a wiki:

“The simplest online database that could possibly work.”

http://wiki.org/wiki.cgi?WhatIsWiki

If you add a button which sends the following URL, people can automatically submit their collection RSS feed to Edu_RSS:

http://www.downes.ca/cgi-bin/edurss02.cgi?action=Suggest&url=URL

where URL is the URL of the collection’s RSS feed.

I’d do it as a web service or XML-RPC or something fancy, but I don’t know how to do those. Anyhow, this works just fine.

I will eventually create a registry of implementations of Edu_RSS, so the collection owner can choose which collection to submit it to.

Also, note that I have posted a link to a CC license rather than the typical copyright notice in the copyright field. Ideally, the user here would have a drop-down of available license models; the value of the field would be a link to the (XML version) of that license.

Any how - very nice implementation, and I really like the fact that you’ve written a nice simple application that will be easy to customize and (even more importantly) easy to communicate with.

I’m planning on rolling in RSS support, as well as tying in authentication (so everyone doesn’t just trip over each other’s stuff). In my head, I’m seeing something like del.icio.us, where several people can “tag” a piece of media, and it can show you lists of everyone who tagged it, as well as how they describe it. This would be less useful for things that are uploaded (which is the initial primary purpose of the system), so these features will trickle out when I get time…

I definitely plan on polishing a REST interface to make it easy for folks to work with, as well as bookmarklets for easy tagging of online media, and integration with the Creative Commons license generators.

It’s not ready to be harvested quite yet, but when it is, I’ll integrate a call to EduRSS!