In the last few days I’ve been to two very good public lectures. One was on Lake Mungo and the other on William Buckley and William Barak.
If a friend hadn’t pointed out the first one, I’d never have known about it. This got me thinking.
So, if I can use my mobile phone – or any browser – to subscribe to Big Brother news updates, why not future Public Lectures in the Melbourne area?
My technical side says – initially – it could be be quite simple. Just have the providers (The Universities, The Museums, Local Councils etc) add a newsfeed (aka RSS) and I have a web site that subscribes to these XML feeds and then publishes them as a web page.
Adding a RSS feed should be very simple for the Providers. They may already do it. Both my Blogging software and main Web Site software have it built in.
Then my consultant side kicked in and I started to think about the issues: who decides what’s a public lecture? If Big Computer Company has one called The History of the PC from 1979 to 2005, then sweet. But what if they have one called Getting the Best from your Database Server? Is that just a thinly disguised selling-seminar and should it be included in this ‘academic/general interest’ Public Lecture site?
Mmmm. Messy. And is it my decision or should the reader/user decide? Or perhaps limit the Providers to not-for-profit or non-commercial organisations.