CogBlogged Tagged ‘wide world of blog’

I’ve been trying to use coComment, the tool that allows you to keep a record of your “distributed” blog conversations– by activating a bookmark when commenting elsewhere, coComment stores it on their site,a dn then submits it normally to the blog you are jabbering about. This way you can track conversations by visiting your coComment page (or by using its own RSS feed). Here is a peek at my little bit of coCommeting: This saves the trouble of having to remember to return to a blog entry to see if anyone responded to your stellar remarks, and avoids having to get email reminders (and not all blogs even offer than as an option). The nice thing is in the view there or via RSS you can track the other responses, not just your own. Actually I am getting more use out of my coComment RSS feed in my aggregator, I [...]

Actions speak much more clearly than definitions. It was D’Arcy at the UBC Social Software Salon who described it something like being removing or downplaying the “software” portion of online social interaction. Whatever your way of describing what “social software” is how, submitted below is a nice example of the informal way the web, blogs, maybe even RSS play a role in collectively building something in a way not previously possible. At the 2006 Northern Voice Conference, I got an early seat for Nancy White’s session on Seven Competencies of Online Interaction (I very much liked the discussion approach she had organized for the Mossecamp session the day before). Brian Lamb convened the session with a quick intro, and someone asked if it was being recorded, and there was no answer. Since I had in my bag my handy little iRiver MP3 recorded, I quickly fished it out, and started [...]

Opening pieces of Northern Voice 2006. I would have thought the auditorium would be a wee bit more packed. First up was Starting with Fire: Why Stories Are Essential and How to Blog Effective Tales by Julie Leung. There was something very refreshing in the presentation style (pure images, a pointed presentation lacking word bullet points. The imagery was moving, but it seemed a bit to go more on about the virtues and values of storeis and less about how stories are donw via blogs. There were a handul of blog examples tossed up at the end (hope I got the URLs correct): http://www.blogs.salon.com/0003522 http://www.theworldisnotflat.com http://mysonnicholas.blogspot.com http://www.2020hindsight.org/category/1945 http://evelynrodriguez.typepad.com http://ferrytale.blogspot.com http://postsecret.blogspot.com http://unkemptwomen.blogspot.com I would have liked ro see more on this and the hows, methods, etc. She did offer up a delicious tag stream of references: http://del.icio.us/julie_leung/storytelling The next headliner was Sifry on the Blogosphere, Dave Sifry interviewed by Tim Bray. [...]

I’ve often asserted that blogging is a social process, that the mere publishing, caterwauling, prettying up templates, is only a piece of it– blogging is also participating in other people’s blogs. There is nothing that will energize a budding blogger more than getting feedback, and the impact is even larger when it comes from someone distant or unknown. It validates (or invalidates, or infuriates) a blogger’s writing. It says that you are not just spewing words out into the ether, that they land somewhere. And it connects us. My favorite example described by Matthew Kirschenbaum as “Comment Blogging” he describes the actions of François Lachance who lacks a published blog, but instead blogs in the comments space of other blogs: I can predict the range of theoretical positions such a “blog” (should we call it a comment blog?) might be said to occupy: this is blogging in the margins, distributed [...]

It’s been 2 few weeks since we released the first online version of our MCLI iForum publication (see the background info blogged nearby). We are hoping to push the publication envelope to go completely online (the print button is in the reader’s hands) and using WordPress as a publishing platform. Our timing was not optimal as it was during the ramp up to finals week here. However, even with the blatant red “i”, and what we thought were obvious invitations to respond to articles via the comments field, the response has been… well… not much. A major justification we prepared for this move to online publishing was the ability for readers to connect with authors (all comment notifications are sent to all credited authors, and we offer per-article email subscriptions to comment updates). So I wonder… is it a fear of commenting? of making the first comment? Maybe the articles [...]

I’m scurrying madly trying to ramp up a promise to have a Word Press publishing platform ready to release an online version of our mcli Forum. We have been doing a print and web version of this since 2001, and a previous ancestor since 1993. The print version twice a year costs more than a few $k, and takes up a huge amount of staff time in the editing and layout process. Then the web version is another conversion on top of that. And we have no good data on what people do with them after they go out through our campus mail system and land in peoples old fashioned in boxes (the wooden cubby ones in department offices). What we are proposing as gains for a completely online version are: * save money and time * shorten the editing process time and allow remote online editing * have no [...]

I’ve not been blogging.. much. On the other hand, something that was always utterly fascinating to me is the concept of “comment blogging”, someone who has no self-published blogs, but actively participates and ‘exists’ more distributed-like in the comment space of other people’s blogs. Often, I have found this to be a missing piece of the pie in blog discussions- there is a lot of emphasis on the blog software, the features, the templates, the “rules” for publishing, writing, feeding, etc, all focused on “my blog” but less so in a key aspect of blogging- interacting and contributing in the activities on other people’s sites, hence “Blogging is a Social Process”. Now that was a nice thought when written 2 years ago, now we deal with blog comment spam, and I am disappointed to find blogs where I cannot comment back. I understand the decision, but still do not like [...]

This semester I am taking a complete respite from the usual big ed tech conferences… well, I am taking a break from all of them. The time spent traveling, the cost of travel, really do not balance for the things gained. That said, online conference have yet to really find a niche yet that provides value as well. The value I speak of is what I am able to gain by surfing RSS feeds and blogs I place my trust in. So last week there were 10s, 20s, maybe much more from our system among the 6 gazllion other ed tech types in Orlando for EDUCAUSE 2005, but really, for all the techies there is hardly made a ripple in the blog-o-sphere. Of course the bulk of blogging activity was taking place in the EDUCAUSE hosted blogs which were nice, lots of podcasts, but mostly lots of “rah-rah”. I am [...]

Oh, what I would do with $72,000,000 of blog bucks! From How Much Is My Blog Worth?: Inspired by Tristan Louis’s research into the value of each link to Weblogs Inc, I’ve created this little applet using Technorati’s API which computes and displays your blog’s worth using the same link to dollar ratio as the AOL-Weblogs Inc deal. My blog is worth $72,825.66.How much is your blog worth? Yet another cool thing swiped from D’Arcy Norman…

I gotta stop blogging and do some work… but then Stephen Downes has to share this nifty tool from PubSub– LinkRank: LinkRanks are our way of measuring the strength, persistence, and vitality of links appearing in sites that syndicate their content. When PubSub reads an entry from a syndication feed, it takes note of any URLs (technically, URIs) it sees. PubSub users can then utilize this link data when creating subscriptions to better express what they’re looking for. PubSub monitors millions of feeds. By generating a list of all the URLs contained in entries of each feed, it’s possible to determine a site’s relevance just from the number of incoming links it has. LinkRank goes one step further and calculates a score for each linking site. Sites are then scored based on the score of the sites that link to them. So the CogDogBlog LinkRank gives me a whole raft [...]