Thursday 23 October 2008

The Parable of the Unforgiving Banks?

In the news today, the banks the UK government have been bailing out and providing emergency loans to are reportedly being less than helpful when small businesses approach them for loans, and the UK Chancellor and the Business Secretary are unhappy about it. An odd thought popped into my head that this sounds rather like an old parable playing out in real life (though I can't really imagine the UK government changing its mind about rescuing the banks). But I can just imagine Alistair Darling thinking "Maybe I should ask the Archbishop of Canterbury to pop round to RBS and have a word".

Wednesday 15 October 2008

Docwit

Coming soon to the Intelligent Book is an update to the way that content is edited to support real-time collaborative editing. If two people edit the same page at the same time, they will see each other's changes as they happen. (Well, with maybe a 30 second delay.) This is a way of editing that users have become used to with sites like Live Workspace, Acrobat.com, and Google Docs.

The code is actually already in the Intelligent Book, I just haven't turned it on yet. One way of thinking about it is that it does docs with TinyMCE. The same code is also intended to go into the Sakai 3 content management system, so I've set up an open source project for it called Docwit.