In October 2010, Robert Darnton, the historian and university librarian at Harvard, talked to Wired Campus about the possibility of building what was then being described as a National Digital Library. Since then, Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, with money from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, has stepped into the role of coordinating plans for what’s now being designated a Digital Public Library of America.

The planning has a public component as well: The Berkman Center has set up a wiki to which anyone can contribute. “We very much hope that this wiki will be the embodiment of a consensus-based and peer-produced approach,” the center notes on the welcome page.

The wiki lays out major topics related to the proposed DPLA project: content and scope (which includes a handy roundup of digitizing projects in the United States and abroad), governance and business models, legal and technical issues. It’s early days, but to get a sense of how the conversation’s shaping up, check out the most active pages on the wiki. (It’s also instructive to poke around the least-revised pages so far.)

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I direct your attention to my brand-new website affectionately known as Best Online Private Schools. I hope that you will consider taking a look at it and let me know what you think.

And, yes, this is one of the secrets of which I have been speaking.

And, yes, there is more to come.

A short while back, I mentioned an “Amazingly Secret Web Project.” Today if you go over to Best Online High Schools, you will discover that a brand-new design went live last night. It is my hope that it provides a better resource for the online high schools community.

It also provides what I hope is a better format on the back-end for me to use. The previous design was done in Joomla and ultimately it did not work as I would wish. This new design is actually a WordPress theme and was designed by my regular developer, Bob Martin.

To say I am pleased with how it turned out would be an understatement.

What? Part 1? You mean there’s more?

Yes. Yes, there is, but you will need to be patient.

I am hip-deep in an amazingly secret, but more than a little interesting, web project that will greatly increase the web presence for online high schools as we now know them. It is so very secret that I can’t even tell you all (even though I know you wouldn’t rush out and tell others). Yes, it is that secret.

That being said, I am hopeful to be able to show you by next weekend what Stage 1 of ASWP (Amazingly Secret Web Project) actually looks like. How many stages are there? Probably nine. Or 59. Depends on how you break it all down.

I am excited to show you the beginnings, so I hope you will come back and take a look.

While there is still some minor work being done, for the most part, Virtual School News is up and running again. It will be offering significantly more news about online schools and related subjects. I hope you will take a look at VSN 2.0.

If you are one of the several thousand folks that follow VirtualSchoolNews.com, yes, it is temporarily down. I am doing a serious upgrade to the site that should result in more and better articles and information. Check back in 48 hours or so. It should be done by then.

Some increased functionality happening over at Online Synthesis. My friend, Bob Martin, figured out a way to get the outbound links to open in their own window. Clearly, this is preferable for a variety of reasons, but the WordPress theme was not set up to do that. If your goal is to keep folks on your site, you need links to open in new windows. The site now does exactly that and I am pleased. By the way, if you are looking for someone to help you set up a WordPress theme, Bob’s your man. While I have some WordPress skills, he’s the guru! Worth paying someone to get it just right.

Yesterday, at my online high schools site, I had less traffic in one day than I have had since 2007 when I launched the site. I am not sure at all why that might be. Traffic was seriously down. When I saw it inside the cPanel, I actually went to the website to make sure that it was still up. The only time that I have seen anything like that occur was when there was a problem with the website. Today is slow as well.

Very odd.

You may recall that I mentioned a super-secret surprise? It is mostly completed, so you get to be among the first to see it. It is a brand-new website that pulls in RSS feeds about online high schools, online colleges, and educational technology.

The name? Online Synthesis.

I hope that you will consider taking a look. I am quite pleased with how it has turned out. Since these seem to be the three areas that I do a great deal of reading — online high schools, online colleges, ed tech — I decided that there are likely other folks out there just like me. Scary thought!