One of the areas of focus at BloggerCon will be weblogs in education. So we've got a couple of people lined up who are scholars who use weblogs with excellence. No announcements yet, but they're great people.

Now I want to balance that with a couple of educators who have successfully created a network of weblogs in a school, school district, college, university. I'm looking for people who support people who use weblogs, in a context that is not about weblogs, if possible.

My goal of course is to learn from them, and then figure out what the next steps are. What do they need from other educators. What software is missing?

We've already got some famous universities, I want to get connected with some not-so-famous universities. Who is leading in use of weblogs in education? Who do you look to for insight and inspiration? That's who I want for BloggerCon.

If you have ideas, please post them here in the comments section, or send them via email to me at dwiner@cyber.law.harvard.edu. [Dave Winer]

Great to see that Dave and the Harvard folks are finally making an effort to connect with the educational Weblogging pioneers. So, if you want to point to some people in the educational field "who support people who use weblogs, in a context that is not about weblogs"... throw in your suggestions.

[Sebastian Fiedler]

[seblogging]

RSS and Echo. Well the big companies have finally made their move in the weblog world with Sam Ruby being directed by IBM to take control of an emerging syndication standard. Why now? Big publishing companies are starting to think about using RSS (really simple syndication) not only to automate the delivery of news to readers but also to automate the production of news. IBM is very interested in this given their longstanding and extremely lucrative relationship with the WSJ ($500m over the last three years) and other publishers. It would be against their interest to let a simple syndication standard emerge that didn't require lots of IBM iron and software expertise. RSS had to die. Also, if you small vendors or individual contributors think that you are gaining some say or freedom with the development of Echo, think again. The big companies are going to roll right over you as the push this forward over the next couple of years. [John Robb's Radio Weblog]

Britain's first not-for-profit estate agency has been set up to help regenerate a notoriously rundown area of Liverpool. [guardian regeneration news]