I'm looking forward to attending the TeachMeet07 tomorrow in Edinburgh. Should be an interesting evening.

Dave's first day of blogging was Scripting News: 4/1/1997. Happy Anniversary Dave! Scripting News, and Dave's blogging tools ware basically what started me blogging. Thanks Dave.

Given the fines served by the Blog Standards Institute I decided to use the 'payment' of these fines as a way to raise money for Comic Relief.

Since the fines needed to be paid in public, a number of students enthusisatically agreed ot help and the Window's Logo shave and colour have been videoed and posted to YouTube. A search for Duncan Smeed on YouTube will reveal all ;-)

According to a ruling I received from the nascent Blog Standards Institute Duncan's Jotter has violated a number of Blog Standards for which I have been fined. Here's the text of the ruling sent to me by the Institute's spokesperson Avril Furst:

Perhaps the most serious violation of our Blog Standards is the fact that Duncan's Jotter - as one of the longest-running blogs - has established a readership measured in some tens and several of these readers are Mr Smeed's past students and, as such, expect the same degree of insight and opinion that they'd come to appreciate whilst a student of his. Duncan's Jotter has manifestly failed to deliver this level of insight over the past six months.

Another major factor in our decision to fine Mr Smeed is that Duncan's Jotter should have kept abreast of the web standards supported by the Blog Standards Institute. Mr Smeed has failed to move beyond the Web 0.2 technologies that he's been using since the mid-1990s.

The Blog Standards Institute decided to impose a fine for the transgression of failing to update Duncan's Jotter. This fine was served on Thursday 22nd March and took the form of a Windows Logo shaved in Mr Smeed's head as reliable sources informed us that this would humiliate him into updating his blog. Sadly, thus level of humiliation does not seem to have had the desired effect and, consequently on Thursday 29th March, the BSI imposed its ultimate humiliation - a public shaving and blue painting of Mr Smeed's head. We hope that this level of humiliation will act as a incentive to all other bloggers to keep their blogs up to date in content as well as in presentation.

I've just signed up for BarCamp / BarCampScotland. Should be interesting. Looking forward to it.

Thanks to Ewan McIntosh for bringing the event to my attention. When I meet someone like Ewan - in this instance on the train from Glasgow to Edinburgh a couple of months ago - it renews my enthusiasm for the use of web technology in education. A chance meetings like our's is also evidence of the 'six degrees of separationprinciple. In our case one degree of separation in the form of Don Ledingham and Extreme Learning (XL).