If:blog

Last week I gave a talk on peer learning with Ben Vershbow of NY think-tank if:book. He's been doing some fabulous things in collaborative reading, which I think could have big implications for the way blogs and discussion forums interact. If:book have developed a hack for the Wordpress platform which places comments to the right of each paragraph of a blog post. It's based on marginalia in old-fashioned academic texts and is intended to allow collaborative annotation of academic texts - but it's such a simple tool that I think it's got much wider implications.

We've been playing with an installation of the system based on the talk we gave at www.futureofthebook.org/freeschool, with some success.

The software itself is available for free at www.futureofthebook.org/commentpress. I strongly urge you to check it out and put it to good use!

Everything, Now!

The School of Everything is now open to the public. We officially opened our doors at Minibar last night, and although it's still early days there's lots in there to help people advertise classes and find teachers near them. It's a community site so please do sign up and join us, even if you don't want to teach yourself. At the very least you should meet some interesting people.

Take a look now at www.schoolofeverything.com, or say hello to us at hello[at]schoolofeverything.com.

Seedcamp

This month the School of Everything was shortlisted by Seedcamp as one of the top 20 tech start-ups in Europe. We didn't get the final round of funding but it's a brilliant endorsement for what we're doing - and from some of the most respected people in the web 2.0 world. We're also in the FT today. Here's an excerpt: (if you're registered, the full article is here)

One characteristic that seems to differentiate the Seedcamp start-ups from their US counterparts is the importance of social causes over the desire to make money.

The team behind School of Everything, an online marketplace to bring together private teachers and students, have backgrounds in journalism and social activism. Their technical director missed a day of Seedcamp so he could buy a tank to drive to a protest at a London arms fair.

Our CTO Pete was also in the mainstream press for driving said tank to the arms fair, which just goes to show there are more ways to get press coverage than you might think. Seth Godin would be proud.