(HSBN) Online Content Creation Tools

Posterous is A Good Thing.But Friendfeed is better.

As part of my postgraduate scientific writing project I needed to set up a site for a student who has been identified as needing extended writing support. To minimize my workload, my first thought was to set up a blog and get them to write about life in general at least once a week. The student wants the blog to be private. The supervisor wants the student to read/write about plant biology. No worries.Whenever anyone asks me how to set up a blog (not that anyone does), Posterous is my first call (and WordPress my second, depending on what's required). Posterous is simple, flexible, and the workflow is good. But not as good as Friendfeed. I've set the student up with a (private) Friendfeed account. Into that I've dropped the PubMed Arabidopsis RSS feed and a few hyperlocal feeds to give it a flava. Plenty to read and write about. The student picks a paper and writes a few hundred words about it once a week. I subscribe to the Friendfeed comments RSS to monitor activity and respond with corrections and suggestions. No need to fiddle about with multiple logins on Google Reader and Posterous. Attention is focused in a single location. Simples. And scalable across the College.