The idea of PlanetOU was always to represent a community around an institution by aggregating blogs written by people connected to it (the idea is explained in full in my earlier post What planet are you from? PlanetOU of course!). It uses the core Aggregator module in Drupal to pull in content from about fifty different websites to make a constant stream view of the latest blog posts from OU staff bloggers. This approach works well, but a key point to note here is that when feed items are imported in this way Drupal does not create new node items (it isn't native content to the software that runs this site), and as such are not visible to the built-in search engine. These blogs are spread across many different domains (e.g. only a few people on the TwitterLeague for OU people use the OU's blogging facilities) and so are not indexed by any institutional search engine. Fortunately there is now a solution to this challenge; a Google Custom Search Engine (Google CSE).

Ambient technology is definitely not about mood lighting, instead it is something far more interesting. It is a term which describes an idea that technology will adapt itself to your presence, performing the necessary reconfigurations and integration to meet your needs or simply increase your comfort. Typically it will do this without much of a need for human interaction, instead it just quietly gets on with its job. Such technology can be used for a variety of purposes, one of them being to deliver information to the user in situations where it is appropriate to take in a chunk of information at a glance, think of quickly glancing at a photo rather than looking at a spreadsheet. You could stare at a photo for quite a long time, but you can take in most of the information it has to offer quite quickly, the same is generally not true for a spreadsheet. An ambient information system such as this can be used to get a sense of what a community is up to, a perfect candidate being a community of Twitter users. A system which does just that is Twitterspaces which is now available as a view of OU users on Twitter at: http://eniac.hopto.org/soiaware/twitter_display/planetou.php.

All sorts of people connected with The Open University are blogging about their interests, experiences and knowledge they want to share with you. These people include not just academics but also librarians, tutors, techies and project managers all putting information out there and discussing ideas, it's a side of the OU that you might not have thought about, one that isn't immediately visible when you deal with the OU, or even work in the place, but it is quite an interesting side. If you put all of these people together you start to get a sense of what this community is talking about, the discussions within it and what is being considered for the future. Enter PlanetOU, the part of this site that tries to bring these voices together in one place.