Martin and I have begun creating a URI scheme for cocoon that will hopefully make sense to users as a URL.
We created a "projects" subdirectory in cocoon (on lettuce) with a sitemap which only contains the homedir mount:
<map:match pattern="*/**">
<map:mount check-reload="yes" src="/home/{1}/webapps/" uri-prefix="{1}"/>
</map:match>
This was necessary because when we set up the automounting of homedir/webapps, the match was global and overrode access to the cocoon tree with samples and blocks and so forth.

This has replaced the previous scheme (matching homedirs in the cocoon root sitemap).

Now, when a user wants to view a website like ScanCan, the url is http://lettuce.tapor.uvic.ca/cocoon/projects/scancan/.
The content for this project is in the {user-home-dir}/webapps/ directory - in this case /home1t/scancan/webapps/.

The advantage to this is that all "projects" get picked up automatically, leaving the whole cocooon tree (with samples, blocks etc) still available.

We will also create other subdirs in the cocoon tree to point to "journals" and others as the need arises.