Apologies for not having posted for a long time here. We've been totally nose-to-grindstone in software development work on knotes, the weblogging and discussion product for Plone which we've been working on since late 2004. And at last the hard work has paid off --- knotes is available in version 0.8 BETA now, and it seems to be popular with end-users; it is certainly much improved in usability. It is very feature-rich, and supports a number of key web2.0-ish standards. It is the weblogging system under the hood of this blog, for instance.

We've completed pushing recent improvements into knotes on sourceforge. To indicate that we feel the product is almost at the "it just works" stage, we've incremented it's version number to 0.8 BETA. Please feel free to try installing knotes in your own Zope/Plone set-up. We still have documentation and end-user help to write, and still need to provide an issue-tracking system

I don't have time to go into the merits of knotes here and now, but readers of this blog might like to check it out as a possible platform upon which to base experimental work in edu-blogging, learning activities, goal- and resource-centred discussion, "portfolios" and "personal learning environments". We'll be exploring a number of such experimental variations on the them of blogging ourselves, and will be concentrating next-generation knotes work on web2.0 integration - microformats, social bookmarking integration, "glu" like personal dashboards, etc etc...

I'm now hoping to get the time to get started on a few of the articles I've been itching to write about architectural, ed-tech and ed-tech-politics issues. Mind you, we do have a lot of project-management work to finish in the next 30 days, and we are also planning to have a first pass at extending knotes for personal-devekopment-profiling by mid-April, and there are still glitches to fix and documentation to write, so please excuse me if there's another extended silence here :o)