Title links to the NewsQuest post by Anne Davis and her students who have been working from Conyers, Georgia via Web log with my journalism students up here in Flemington, New Jersey. (Be patient as it’s very slow to connect.) It’s been a great experience for me and my students as it’s given them the opportunity to do some teaching, which in my brain equates to learning. I’m sure there are even better examples out there, but as I’ve said before, this is the best part of using Web logs; the ability to invite different audiences to the process. Journalism is no longer just a classroom activity for my students.
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Well, it looks like Dave Winer is serious. Note the following from the Yahoo Manila Developers Group that he just started:

I want all sites to be news item oriented, unless the user specifically opts for a non NIO site. Unfortunately most of the themes we have go the wrong way. I want them to be news item oriented because:
1. All the other blogging tools, Radio, Blogger, Moveable Type, etc are NIO.
2. The nice editing tools and the blogging APIs are also NIO.
3. A lot of the complexity of Manila melts away with NI orientation.

I’m thinking some serious development of templates that would lessen some of the configs I currently have to make. And then there’s this:

So, after I get the theme done, I’m not totally done yet. I’ve budgeted about a week for a new page for managing your weblog posts, that works much like the “desktop website home page” in Radio, or the main editing interface of Blogger. I don’t like the way Moveable Type does it, while they have lovely graphics, there are too many steps in creating a weblog post, their interface is klunky. I like simplicity, transparency.

Now we’re getting somewhere…no more News–Create News Item–Post to Home Page stuff? And did he say the “S” word. Hallelujah! Question now is should we all pony up with our Wish List for Manila for educators? I mean he IS doing this all for Harvard…we should at least be in on the potential trickle down.

And on another note, he gives props out to Bryan Bell and his truly magnificent Kern site. (This is what I’m going to shoot for here.) But here is the really scary part…Bryan says:

This completes the transition to Manila™ we started 2 years ago. The homepage was last on the list, because we decided to do it back to front. We converted every department in the organizations and nearly all of our client schools. I must have trained 300 people on how to manage their Manila™ site.

Ahem…I’ve got some work to do…