Weblogs

I hadn't heard the term "commonplace book" before, but it sounds like a perfect description of the "outboard brain" - the main reason I started blogging. It wasn't about publishing anything, or discussing or commenting or connecting. It was documenting a flow of ideas and contexts.

Steven Berlin Johnson gave a talk back in April, describing the history of the commonplace book. He was using it as an introduction and context for the need to be able to remix content - as an argument against locked down electronic books that implement DRM to prevent copy and paste - and it nicely describes both the need to remix, and the need to document.

I was just invited to enter an entirely reputable "blog awards" contest, for the low, low entry fee of only $195 - but ACT NOW! The entry fee goes up to $275 in January!

I can't wait to be invited to attend the Nigerian Dead Relatives Blog Directory Awards...

Another silly quiz, claiming to calculate one's blog addiction score. pfff. it's waaaaay off.

85%How Addicted to Blogging Are You?

Definitely skewed low. Some MySpacers are probably blowing the curve. Good thing they didn't include Twitter and Flickr. I'd be in the triple digits easily...

I was asked to share my Edublogs reading list, which is published automatically by my copy of BlogBridge, in the BlogBridge Topic Guides website. It's basically a web front end for the .opml file generated by BlogBridge, but it might be a handy way to share the list.

So, now I'm a "BlogBridge Topic Expert" - I'm rather uncomfortable with the term "expert" but it's their word, not mine. The new Edublogs Reading List is online, and (I think) should stay synced with my list in BlogBridge, so maintenance won't be a problem.

This blog is about 2 posts away from devolving into a bona fide cat diary (and I'm not exactly a fan of cats). I'll be trying to stop barfing banality into the internet tubes, so as a result I'll probably be posting much less. Hopefully, as quantity goes down, quality (and relevance) may go up? Or, I might just wind up raising the bar so high that I finally fall out of this whole blogging thing. Either way, meh...

After a couple of hours of running with Drupal as my blogging platform, there are some areas that are definitely behind WordPress as a pure blog-friendly system.

• Comments. Typical blogs have "name", "url", "email" and "comment" fields. Drupal has an optional "Subject" and a "Comment" field. It works, but makes it harder to follow contributions in a conversation - you have to remember to put your name in the comment each and every time you post. Not friendly I was a bonehead - there's an option to make this behave as expected, under admin/comments/configure.
• Subscrbing to comments. Email subscriptions to a post's comments is the most powerful and effective way to maintain a conversation on a blog. The "subscriptions" module would work, but it only understands Drupal's users. The vast majority of commenters (i.e., everyone but myself) won't have an account in this copy of Drupal, so Subscriptions.module is useless to them. Close, though. All it needs is Anonymous user support, with a way to provide an email address. Not friendly.
• CoComment support. Lacking. I'm going to miss that, at least until I figure out how to properly implement it. Not friendly.
• Flicker Photo Album. There's a Flickr module that claims to do something similar, but it just isn't working for me. So, in the meantime, the "photos" link in the header nav bar points directly to Flickr. Not friendly.
• Flickr photo posting. There's a FlickrInserter module, modeled after Tantan's excellent Flickr Post Bar plugin for WordPress (which, in turn, is modelled after the awesome Flock Flickr Post bar). For now, I'm copying and pasting HTML directly from Flickr. Not friendly.
• I miss PodPress. Have to find a comparable solution for Drupal. Not fatal, but it sure was nice.

Of course, it's not all cloud - there is some silver in there. I did decide to switch, after all, and am not regretting it one bit (yet). Things that are good:

I've been spending so much time in Drupal lately that I've been contemplating moving my blog from WordPress to Drupal to take advantage of some of the flexibility in Drupal. I've even gone as far as migrating a copy of this blog, and it's basically working now - it may even look familiar.

But, I'm holding off on throwing the switch (I came within about 5 seconds of a full switchover, but finally decided against it). Why? WordPress is still nicer for individual blogging. Sure, it lacks the super-handy Book structure. And the better Menu and Page management. And a bunch of other cool stuff.

My copy of Will's book "Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms" just came in. Looks like it's going to be a pretty good read, providing the perspective of an in-the-trenches teacher, rather than just the geek echochamber I usually expose myself to...

The book is definitely on top of my nonfiction reading list (my fiction reading, on the bus ride commute, is currently another Gregory Benford book I'm deliberately reading out of sequence...)

I just about spaced and missed this online conference on "blogging" in higher education: HigherEdBlogCon 2006 (thanks for the reminder, Brian!)

The first round of online events (April 3-7 - right now!) is on the teaching implications of blogging. Topics like case studies, integration with LMS, blogs as personal learning environments, information literacy, etc...

The next round of events (April 10-14) is on library & info resources, followed by admissions/alumni/marketing (April 17-21) and websites & web development (April 24-28).

Stephen Downes is taking a hiatus from publishing his awesome OLDaily resource. Stephen - I have no idea how you've managed to keep up the volume and quality of publishing you have done so far! You definitely deserve a break. I'll miss OLDaily while it's gone.

I'm feeling a bit like Rob - our Gandalf has just disappeared into the depths of Moria, and we're now left to stumble through on our own. Hopefully his hiatus is a bit more relaxing, but I'm looking forward to meeting Stephen The White...

This is welcome news indeed! Greg Ritter has returned from his long, long silence, and has begun blogging again! I'm guessing Greg found it easier to go underwater during the whole Bb IPO and WebCT shindigs, but now that those things have been dealt with maybe he'll be able to blog more often.

Excellent news, Greg. I'd been keeping your old blog in my subscriptions Just In Caseâ„¢ and have already subscribed to your new one.

Another thinking-out-loud topic here... I'm re-evaluating weblogs.ucalgary.ca - what's worked, what hasn't, what could be done differently. It's best to take a long, hard look at it before it really takes off. There are a bunch of users in it now, but a critical evaluation of it is pretty important before we get into the hundreds of users level... I'm also colouring evaluation in light of the PLE/EduGlu concepts being rolled around. Perhaps the need to have a communal blog hosting service on campus is less important, or unnecessary, if that function is pushed into an aggregator service where it should be, rather than in the hosting side of things.

I hadn't heard of this one before, but I stumbled across Deepest Sender while poking through the Firefox extensons database. It's a XUL app, so should run nice and fast. At first blush, it looks like a pretty handy way to quickly post stuff. It took maybe 10 seconds to configure to point at my WordPress blog here.

The editing interface only appears to let you select one category, though, but nicely handles keyboard input to select a category quickly.

In my neverending quest for The One True Blog Management App, I downloaded the latest beta of Qumana. It's pretty cool. Cross platform now (well, MacOSX and Windows). It's got its own ad manager system, which I won't be using, but that's how they'll be trying to pay the bills.

The WYSYWYG editor is pretty decent. Haven't tried to break it yet, though. Let's see how it handles preformatted code:

public void Main() {
    System.out.println("Trying out Qumana");
}

Hmm... didn't handle that well... They all seem to bork on that.

Over the last few days, I've been privileged to be a part of some extremely interesting and engaging discussions about the nature of "blogging" in education. The Social Software Salon and Edublogger Hootenany sessions were incredible, unstructured, free-flowing, and unbelievably interesting. Essentially, there were no "presenters" and no "moderators" - both were completely open and lively discussions that I was lucky to be present for.

There were several recurring themes that emerged from these sessions, stated from multiple perspectives by several people with different backgrounds. Here's my Colesâ„¢ Notesâ„¢ version of these sessions. It's not unabridged, and if I'm missing (or misrepresenting) anything, I'm going to Trust In Blog that I'll be corrected. I'm sure I'm forgetting large tracts of the conversations - they were recorded, and will be available as podcasts as soon as Jason and Brian have had time to edit and publish the audio. In the meantime, the wiki pages (linked above) for both sessions provide some background (thanks to Brian for setting those up).

There was a coComment invitation waiting in my inbox this morning. I activated it, and tested it out on a couple of blogs. It actually works! It provides a simple way to track comments I've left all over the place. Very very cool.

I do have a couple questions about the service though. It's provided by a Swiss startup company - so, will they pull a bait-and-switch and start charging? What are they going to do with the data? These conversation threads could be mined for all kinds of good/evil. Can we opt out of sharing some conversations? Can we delete (not just hide, but nuke from orbit) a monitored conversation?

I just saw a link to coComment (via an OReilly blog, IIRC - can't seem to find the link at the moment) It looks like a way to track comments that you make on various blogs, providing a way to keep on top of conversations distributed throughout the blogosphere.

I've been doing a low-tech version of this by tagging blog comments on del.icio.us with "blogcomment" so I can periodically check in on them. But this appears to but some intelligence, or at least some automation, behind the concept.

I was able to put together a version of the presentation as an "enhanced podcast" using a borrowed copy of Garage Band '06. It worked very well for the task, with one glaring issue - apparently GB can't handle audio longer than 65 minutes, so the last couple of minutes of the presentation audio is truncated. No big loss, as it's mostly just wrapup (and there is an 11-minute section of awesome Q and A around the 30 minute mark - at the "Wiki Discussion" chapter).

I'd planned on releasing a full presentation+audio version of the presentation, but it's going to take me weeks to sync up the 105 slides to the 1-hour audio track.

So, in the meantime, here's the audio-only portion of the presentation (27.2MB MP3). Not sure how well it stands on its own, but it might come in handy for someone.

The only editing I've done to the audio was to remove the 6 minute preamble and embarrassing intro (as Mr. Expert Guy - gack - which is why you hear me mention it at the beginning of the audio). Sorry for the audio quality - it was recorded directly to my iPod via Belkin TuneTalk at an incredible 8KHz, and tweaked in Audacity to make it suck less.

I just put the almost-finishing touches on a presentation I'll be giving to folks in the Faculty of Education tomorrow. The topic? It's basically a tour of things like wikis, weblogs, RSS and podcasting, with a presentation at the beginning, some live demos, and some hands-on time. Essentially "The Read/Write Web 101"

I merged a couple of my other presentations (intro to weblogs and intro to wiki) and added some refinements. It's grown to 105 slides, which sounds scary, but there isn't a bullet point in the bunch, and most slides are only on the Big Screen to give a background while I talk about something. I'm guessing the presentation will run between 30 minutes and an hour, depending on audience participation. We've got a 3-hour slot, and would like to have as much "hands-on" time as possible.

Brian's asking for comments to help build a presentation tonight. I'm cutting it awfully close to the wire (the presentation starts in just over an hour) but hopefully another trackback will help...

What is most significant about the emergence of blogs and/or wikis?

The biggest thing about these self-publishing tools is that they're self-publishing, natch. You don't need to be a geek to be able to publish to the 'net anymore - and this stuff has the potential to "fix" the web, which was supposed to be a dynamic network of linked content published by individuals, but got co-opted into a variation of the TV broadcast model, with users sitting in front of glowing screens receiving the content that The Man wants to feed them (picture a scene from Max Headroom or something). Instead, we can effectively publish our own content, with whatever authority we can muster. Individuals are just as able as companies (large and small) - as an example, this blog currently has a Google rank of 6, which is higher ranked than some companies. That would have been impossible without easy and effective self-publishing tools.

James Farmer just pushed the Nonscholae.org website, which was born from the "learning to swim" discussion in the edublogosphere a few weeks back. From the site:

nonscholae.org is a site devoted to the responsible use of blogs, instant messaging and other social software in schools.

Non scholae sed vitae discimus
We learn, not for school, but for life - Seneca, Epistulae

We believe that these tools and resources should not be blocked or banned from schools. As educators, we should be familiarising learners with these technologies, supporting and facilitating their responsible use and equipping our students with the skills to keep them safe and savvy in the online world.

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The "Performancing" folks just released a plugin for Firefox that provides a fully featured weblog editor, ala Flock. I'm trying it out now - it appears to talk to WordPress OK (well, if this made it to the blog, that is).

It appears to have a decent WYSIWYG editor, but the image embedding doodad doesn't seem to have an upload utility - so I think you have to manually upload an image and then paste the URL into the image widget. Not fatal, but an "easy" improvement to the plugin. (I know, "easy" is oversimplifying it, since the plugin is aimed at being platform agnostic, so you'd have to have special cases for WP, MT, Blogger, etc...)

Ted Buracas just launched a Calgary blogging site: the Blog at Calgary. It looks like a great start, with links to local media, arts, music, entertainment, etc... I've already found a new Jamba Juice replacement called *atomic - downtown, just north of The Bay. Next time I'm downtown, I'll have to check it out (although that may not be for awhile - I seem to be downtown about once per season or so...)

Just poked around the various party websites to see if any of the candidates were blogging - hoping to find a real person running, rather than a campaign manager puppet or a focus group byproduct. I found some interesting things.

Liberal party: They appear to have one blog - posted by Martin's speechwriter via his Blackberry. Very cool. Subscribed. (but it doesn't have full text of entries, just titles. maybe unsubscribing...) My candidate doesn't even have an "about" page - just a map of the riding. Bad form. In the last election, Paul Martin published a blog - it was likely massaged by PR goons, but it was a start. I was hoping they might take the next step...

I think this might be the first time my blog has made it to a short list of anything. Josie just posted the "short list" for the 2005 Edublog Awards, and yours truly was nominated in the "Best designed/most beautiful edublog" category. Not sure how to take that, since I use the K2 template for WordPress and have only done some minor tweaks. I suppose it's a vote for a combination of navigation structure, and those funky panoramic banners I swap through the header.

That last post was essentially a triple-modality experiment. It began life as a dead-trees offline notebook entry, then was recrafted as an audio recording (podcast), and then as a text-only blog entry.

This little experiment highlighted some of the strengths/weaknesses of each modality.

offline notebook

• my handwriting officially sucks. I have trouble reading it myself, which is why I try to force myself to write in all-caps block letters
• writing on a moving city bus doesn't help, either. shaky bus = shakier writing = can I read this?
• paper is a nice medium - can spatially organize stuff easily. can add sketches, doodles, whatnots easily
• paper is harder to share, though. Scanning to Flickr helps, but is not exactly an invisible part of the process
• not searchable. I was scanning through a decade's worth of old notebooks over the weekend - wishing there was some form of index or searchability in them. chronology is nice, but makes it hard to find a specific piece of content unless the exact date it was written is known ahead of time...
• the most private of the three modalities, which can be good for framing thoughts that you don't want to unleash into the ether

audio/podcast

• audio quality can be a problem
• distractions while recording - my dog started whining to be let out into -30ËšC freezingness during the last couple of minutes of the recording.
• really like it for the freeform thinking-out-loud style. not sure how valuable that is to other people, but the 1Ëš purpose of this blog is for me, so screw everyone else. well, ok, not quite that far, but as long as it's useful to me, I'll keep doing it
• publishing process is still quite tedious. have to upsample the audio to 44.1KHz from 8KHz, massage the audio so it sucks less. put in intro track. convert to .mp3. upload. etc...
• opaque medium - unsearchable without relying on external tools.

text-only blog entry

• I think I'm most "at home" with this modality
• can pause, rethink, and take time to write
• it's still legible. I can read it. And The Goog can read it.
• easily taggable, searchable, linkable

Update: The podcast audio file was borked (thanks for the heads up, Brian!) so if you downloaded a 6 minute version, it's truncated. The whole thing should be 18 minutes long, and is available here. Sorry about that...

So, I'm still not using the computer when I'm "off duty", but that doesn't mean I can't stretch out on the couch with my iPod and TuneTalk microphone and think out loud about stuff after Evan's gone to bed...

It would be really cool if Technorati or Bloglines (or Google, or BlogBridge, or Antarcti.ca, or PlumbDesign, or someone else) created a visual relationship mapping tool for the connections between individuals online.

I suppose it would have to be "Identity 2.0" driven, since people may have more than one online presence (a primary blog, a work blog, a personal blog, a Flickr account, a Del.icio.us account, etc...) and the value is showing relationships between people and not software.

Christopher D. Sessums just wrote a piece on using weblogs as a source of reflection in teacher education.

I'm very interested to hear Christopher's thoughts on this topic - we're working on a project with the Faculty of Education here to develop an ePortfolio/reflection process (heavy on the ePortfolio side - likely using Pachyderm and Drupal - that we're just in the early stages of putting a proposal/demo together for).

Weblogs offers several key features that I believe can support a constructive, collaborative, reflective environment. For one, it's convenient. The medium supports self-expression and "voice." Collaboration and connectivity can be conducted efficiently especially interms of participants' time or place. You can access and link to a number of appropriate resources. It provides multiple communication channels (e.g., you can write, record and/or cast your thoughts). Publishing your thoughts online forces you to concretize your thoughts.

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I just finished the first Weblogs and RSS workshop/presentation - "Personal publishing with weblogs and RSS" - an introductory overview of blogging, rss, aggregation, and benefits (and some risks) of blogging.

The session was sold out (20 people), and I think it went reasonably well. Not the best presentation I've ever given, but it seemed to be received OK. It's a hard topic to present about - acronyms are in blogging's DNA - and some of the concepts are just plain foreign to novices. Read/write web? Aggregators? etc...

I've become a huge fan of BlogBridge - it has been the most efficient and powerful rss aggregator I've ever used. But, it kinda sucked because it didn't behave like a native app. I've kind of got a fetish for native apps on MacOSX - apps that behave as expected, look as expected, and do stuff the way they should.

Well, BlogBridge 2.7 is now available as an "actual" application! It runs great and looks the way it should.

Brian just linked to a great description of how blogging can affect reading and writing in the classroom. The blog he linked to is one I hadn't come across in my travels, so I'm dutifully subscribing. Some good thinking about this stuff in Konrad's blog.

What hit me in this post was the simple and clear demonstration of the power of an online community of practice to support the "real" physical face-to-face community. In Konrad's case, it changed his perception of "reading" his student's work - it became a participatory experience - more of a conversation or dialog than a fire-and-forget writing exercise. That, through blogging (or more appropriately, through participation in a dynamic community of practice), his evaluation of students shifted to become somewhat more holistic. Less brute-force "marking" of writing, to more of a comprehensive assessment of competence.

Josie Fraser is at it again, this time with a cool project to map the location of edubloggers around the world.

Right now, it looks rather UK-centric, but once more people add themselves to the list it might be a useful resource to describe the global community of edubloggers. Would that be a part of a global community of practice?

Update: The global domination by the North American Edubloggers Guild has begun! 12 hours after posting the first image, the Risk gameboard has changed markedly:

I just found a link to Blogs n Dogs via Common Craft.com. Looks like a 4 day workshop on blogging and social software, held in Banff at the Banff Centre. Sounds very intersting. I'll have to check it out, but not sure I can justify a 4-day conference/workshop in December. Or, maybe that's perfect timing, since December is usually a write-off anyway...

Sounds like an event tailor made for the illustrious CogDogBlog himself...

In the light of the recent weblogsinc.com sale, with each blog being given an insanely high "value", there's this handy utility to guestimate just how much your blog is "worth", using the same formula used to calculate "value" in the AOL-Weblogs Inc. deal.

So... Where do I cash in my chips? :-)

I'm preparing some stuff for a workshop I'm doing on weblogs and RSS next month, and am gathering some links to aggregators I could recommend to the people coming to the workshop. Obviously, Bloglines and Google's RSS reader are good online aggregators, but desktop tools are just plain cooler.

I was clicking links on the Wikipedia list of RSS aggregators, and saw BlogBridge - a cross-platform, java-based aggregator designed for "civilians".

But, it's got a LOT of nice little touches. You can tag feeds. Star them (and filter views based on star ratings). Create smart listings of posts. It also does something cool that I haven't seen in another aggregator - it creates a little thumbnail indicator bargraph for the activity of a feed over the past few days. You can also give it a list of keywords, and it automatically highlights these words in every post.

Last week, an undergrad student here at the U of C stumbled across both weblogs.ucalgary.ca and wiki.ucalgary.ca. This student was familiar with blogging and wiki (having a LiveJournal already), and dove right in. And quickly proceeded to blow me away with what a student can/will do given a bit of trust and some supporting resources.

In the 6 days since discovering the wiki, this student has made 206 edits to pages. Created new pages. Created page templates. Categories. Shell pages for faculties, departments, and clubs. Templates for user pages. Fleshed out a very interesting user page for himself (including a couple of ideas that I will blatantly borrow for myself). In the "old" way of publishing stuff to the internet, this would have never happened, because there is no way in hell an Institution would let an undergrad edit a faculty web page. Oh, how things change when you open up a little.

One of the things I really love about WordPress is its always-fresh style of pulling pages directly from the database rather than generating hundreds or thousands of static pages. It makes publishing much quicker - you're just adding a new row to the posts table - since there is no "Publishing Pages" stage, as in MovableType etc...

However, that is also the Achilles heal of WordPress - works fine as long as the load is miniscule, but if you get Slashdotted, or have a bunch of simultaneous views, the database can bog down pretty dramatically. Usually, that's not a problem, but the threat is there.

It looks like I'll be doing a couple of campus-wide workshops on the whole weblogs/wikis/rss/etc... stuff here at the University of Calgary. I'm going to try to pace it a little better than previous rounds, so will be breaking it into separate sessions. The first session will be on weblogs and RSS, to give a tour of what this stuff is, and point people at a few places to get started - weblogs.ucalgary.ca and EduBlogs.org. I'll follow up a couple of weeks later with a session on wikis - likely focussing on wiki.ucalgary.ca and the wikipedia.

A friend of mine wanted to migrate from an aging B2 installation to a shiny new WordPress setup. I figured it should be a simple process, given that WP was spawned from B2's loins and all. It should have been relatively trivial - tweak some database fields, massage some data, and done. Not so fast, smartass.

Turns out that all of the tips I found were, well, a bit short. They either didn't work at all, or sorta worked, but not enough to be useful. Crap. So, I started eyeballing the B2 schema. Turns out the biggest difference between the B2 tables and the WP tables is - wait for it - the table names. Aside from that, it's some trivial stuff like changing int into bigint, etc...

They sure are persistent little buggers. I think I've reverted about 50 pages of wiki spam in the last week, on 2 wikis. The little cretins just won't take a clue. They're just smart enough to be able to switch or spoof IP addresses to get around the blocks and bans, but not quite smart enough to realize that I won't let them win.

And, looking at my Referrer Karma blacklist, there are spamroach URLs in there that make even me blush. I mean, these people have nothing better to do than to register dozens/hundreds of obsene URLs, then feed them into their little script kiddie auto-blog-spammer software and see if they can scrape some Google Juice out of it.

Spam Karma 2 just keeps on chugging away, protecting my blog from the scum sucking spam roaches of the world. The roaches are getting marginally more intelligent - starting to try to game the spam blockers.

In the wee hours of the morning, some spammer from somewhere in Asia tried to get onto some kind of whitelist by posting a couple of innocuous comments - with no bad links or scary words. Those 2 comments got through, and then they immediately tried to dump spam into the blog. Those comments were automatically killed by Spam Karma 2. It was able to make a distinction from harmless (although pointless) comments from link spam-infested roach fodder.

My "golden ticket" invitation to wordpress.com came in today, so I surfed over and spent 30 seconds setting up a new blog to see wtf the deal was. Wow. That is one slick and easy blog setup tool. I shouldn't have been too surprised, having already seen a preview of it implemented on James Farmers' Edublogs.org site,

It's got a nice 'n easy "presentation" selector utility - pick a thumbnail of a theme, and it's set as the design for your blog. Doesn't get any easier... Might be too easy, though, since there's no way to customize a theme once you've selected it.

I had a total blast at Northern Voice 2005. It was probably the most laid-back-yet-productive conferences I've been to. It was structured, but not corporate. Loose, but not chaotic. It had a very strong feeling of community - a grassroots "feel" to it, even though many of the "big names" of the blogosphere were there. It was a total community event, and I met so many people from such a wide variety of backgrounds - a real eye opener.

Cole just wrote 2 announcements regarding the Big ADCE Kickoff (which is great and exciting). I got both announcements via RSS feeds, and clicked through to see the full posts. I'm going to use pictures here to make it about as painfully clear as possible.

First, there's the announcement on his ADCE Tools to Enhance Teaching and Learning blog:

Then, there's the announcement on his own blog:

I originally posted this entry on May 18, on the Apple Digital Campus Exchange (ADCE) "Tools to Enhance Teaching and Learning" weblog. I'd post a link, but everyone (including myself) would have to login to the ADCE system to read it. So I'm reposting it here in the hopes that it might make some difference. I'm not holding my breath. I was almost convinced that a walled garden might have value, but on further consideration I have to agree wholeheartedly with Alan - and won't be posting to the ADCE weblogs unless/until the walled garden is opened up to everyone.

After a few month rest period, it feels like the "multiuser weblog software" arena is heating up again. Drupal keeps chugging along. ELGG is looking really sweet, and now WordPress Multiuser (WPMU) is firing back into the competition.

Might be time to take a step back and re-evaluate multiuser software platform before weblogs.ucalgary.ca hits the big time. It's currently running as what might be described as a "limited test pool", with several users dipping their toes, but no hardcore users piping up.

I just went to the Technorati page for Merlot2005, hoping to get a big heaping spoonful of Merlot conference blogging.

Instead, I was greeted by this:

WTF? So, if Alan doesn't go to a conference, nobody knows to use a shared tag to blog about it? Why wouldn't the Merlot conference organizers be pimping the tag "merlot2005" on the conference page?

I've been subscribing to Scoble's feed since shortly before NorthernVoice2005. He's been an interesting source of info and opinion, but he's also afflicted with a strong case of braggadocio regarding "secrets" that he's privy to [1, 2, 3]. That pisses me off. If you know a "secret", even just acknowledging that there is a secret is betraying that trust. Like it or not, Robert, when you signed on with MS, that was part of the deal. And you re-up every time you cash a cheque from Redmond.

The opening reception last night was pretty cool. Got to touch base with a bunch of folks that I hadn't seen since last year's conference, and got to meet a whole bunch of new folks. I didn't win the iPod Shuffle, but that's OK... :-)

I had one of the coolest experiences though. I just had a picture taken with Tim Wang, and as I look up, there is someone standing in front of me, noticing my nametag badge. All of a sudden, she breaks into this gorgeous smile, and says "Are you D'Arcy Norman?"

I just used Blogdigger.com to create a new group for ADCE - which includes a combined RSS feed for all ADCE blogs. It takes each individual RSS feed, monitors them for changes, and spits out a single feed that can be easily subscribed or shared.

It's pulling previous entries, so it should be a usable RSS feed now (it was empty until Blogdigger spidered the feeds, of course).

Planet ADCE

Perfect! The WWDC Blogger's gathering and WebObjects Pub Night overlap, at the same place! Yay, synergy!

bbum's blog-o-mat: WebObjects Pub Night @ WWDC 2005

I guess that means I'll be able to hit both events!

Update: - well, the registration for the blogger's gathering is closed (it's a catered event, and they needed payment etc...), and the WO gathering has moved to the Chieftain Irish Pub. Looks like I may wind up at the Chieftain, or take the evening to stroll SoMA (or head to the waterfront?).

Alan's talking about his Blog-Ha Moment - when blogging "clicked" for him, and suddenly became part of what he did every day.

For me, I started dabbling with blogging after the dot-com eLearning company I was working for self destructed at The End of The Internet Bubble, in March 2001. I needed something to distract my mind from litigation, corporate cornholing, and other business-related evilness.

So I started poking around with Blosxom. I wanted to pick up a bit of Perl, and wanted to start a journal. Yes, my first blog was a lame-assed "it sure is hot today" personal journal. There's a reason why the online archives of my blog don't go back to the beginning... actually, I remembered this wrong... I started with MacJournal, in an offline journal, while poking around with the source for Blosxom to see what good Perl code looked like. The two things didn't meet for a few months...

I just took a few minutes to tweak the UI of Planet ADCE, to better match the rest of the ADCE blog layout.

I also hacked in a simple ADCE blog search, using Google. And I added links to the public blogs, so you don't have to go rooting around for them. I'm toying with the idea of exposing a combined RSS feed, but haven't gotten around to that yet.

If there's anyone at Apple reading this, I'd be more than happy to ship what I've got so it can live on the edcommunity server...

I'm trying a bit of an experiment here... I just installed a (slightly hacked/cleaned-up) copy of Feed on Feeds to aggregate all of the Apple Digital Campus Exchange weblogs via their exposed RSS feeds. I'm hoping this gets replaced by a "real" solution hosted by Apple, but in the meantime...

Planet ADCE: Latest Posts on Apple Digital Campus Exchange Weblogs

It's not pretty - I didn't have time/energy to make it much better than the stock layout. And the order of the old posts is funky due to the way Feed on Feeds sucks in posts - they're stamped with the cache date rather than the post date - so all existing posts got essentially the same cache date and they show up in unpredictable order. This will be sorted out with the new posts, which will be automatically cached every hour.

I've been asked to participate in a new effort by Apple, called the "Apple Digital Campus Exchange" - it's basically a community of folks much smarter and more interesting than myself (ranging from Cole Camplese to Alan Levine to Larry Johnson to Carl Berger) who just get to talk about stuff like The Future, iPods in the classroom, etc...

I thought this was going public next week, but I see it was actually scheduled for launch on May 12. Since it is now somewhat after May 12, I think I'm safe linking to it...

The guys at Blackboard are running an experiment in corporate blogging. Greg Ritter and his cohorts were able to get a blog set up last night, before the 2005 Blackboard Users Conference. They will be posting stories, news, etc. from the conference.

Here's hoping they keep blogging after the conference! And, *ahem* Greg? Your last post on your own blog was August 16, 2004 *cough* :-)

Excellent news! Carl Berger, the Gandalf of EDUCAUSE and Merlot, has (finally) started blogging! Thanks for doing that, Carl, and I look forward to reading your posts!

Leadership Institute Blog » Blog Archive » Hello from Carl Berger Judging from the photo in that post, I'm wondering/hoping he'll be making the trek to NMC2005 in Honolulu this year.

It's even cooler that Carl is blogging as part of the Apple Digital Campus initiative. I listened to the EDUCAUSE NLII podcasts, and it sounds like they're going to be doing some very cool stuff in the next year.

OK. A rant taken from Robert Scoble's playlist.

John Carmack - the guy that wrote Doom, Quake, Quake 2, Quake 3 Arena, Doom 3, and is trying to get into orbit with his own personal venture - has a blog.

But no RSS. WTF? Is he hand-rolling the pages in EMACS? Using some POS app that doesn't do RSS? Have enough rock-star-zillionaire-programmer-groupies that he can't imagine people not camping on his page waiting for updates?

Paul is reading the Medici Effect, and has come across some quotes in the book that help explain the rationale behind weblogs and blogging.

Innovation through blogging.

Tim Bray just posted an awesome article: It's Not Dangerous, in response to the FUD about how blogging will get you fired.

I agree 100% with Tim's conclusions on how blogging can benefit you. I'm going to knock on wood and hope I continue to avoid the potential downfalls (but they're related more to being reckless than being a blogger - hopefully that doesn't apply to me).

Just got an email from Alan Levine asking me to light the beacons to send word throughout the Kingdom of Man that his XServe has succumbed to the unblinking gaze of Sauron himself. As a last ditch effort to salt the earth lest Evil gets a foothold, the server promptly decided to rename/delete some rather critical files. Needless to say, it's now a smouldering pile of shiny brushed aluminum (until probably Monday, when a fresh hard drive module will be slapped in and life-giving charges of electricity once again flow through its temperamental silicon heart).

Paul and I just had a brief meeting to discuss what we wanted to do about this. We decided that the best thing to do would be to set if free, and see if anyone on campus starts fiddling with it.

It's a beta, and we'll be experimenting with the best setup of modules and content, but the only way to know if this boat will float is to put it into the water. So...

Well... I guess the writing's on the wall... Leon Tightlips is about to take over the blogosphere. It was fun while it lasted. I, for one, welcome our new Lightship overlord...

Now, if only Leon Tightfist could have easier-to-type URLs. He might get linked to more often... Oh, yeah, and maybe if he had some meaningful content on his blog. That might help a bit, too... All that's up now is some odd Ali-esque ranting monologue...

I'm tagging along with Brian today, and he's doing a panel session at a conference for music librarians (I didn't even realize there is such a thing as music librarians).

The session is titled "RSS and current awareness for music librarians". Everyone is getting into weblogs and RSS. It's basically a brief intro to the wonderful and wacky world of content syndication, a distilled abstract of NorthernVoice, which runs tomorrow, about 3 blocks down Robson street from here...

Boris Mann just posted link to an iCal Schedule for Speakers at the Northern Voice conference this Saturday. The iCal calendar was compiled by Northwest Noise.

Excellent. I've already subscribed to it in iCal, so it will sync onto my iPod calendar next time I drop it into the cradle. Handy way to keep track of the conference schedule...

Thanks, Boris!

The Speakers and Schedule for Northern Voice were just announced. That looks like a pretty full docket - and one heck of a fine bunch of speakers. The problem is going to be choosing which sessions to attend ;-)

My day will look like this:

• Tim Bray's keynote
• Robert Scoble's session
• Tod Maffin on Podcasting
• Stephen Downes on Community Blogging
• Intro to Blogging (panel, including DJ Wiki himself)
• Multimedia Content (panel, including Marc Canter)
• Tools demo
• Very quick bite
• sprint for the airport...

ps. please forgive them for their evil "browser detection" script, for they know not what they do...

Another comment spammer just attempted to crap on my blog. WordPress and the plugins I use stopped him/her cold, and their subnet is now banned (I know that's heavy handed, but screw 'em).

I checked the stats from Site Meter, and it looks like this clown found my blog by searching Google for the term "wiki" - and slogged through 29 pages of results to get to me. 29 pages of results. Do these people really value their time so poorly? I know they don't value mine, but I simply can't imagine slogging through 29 pages of search results in the hopes of finding a blog or wiki to crap on. Knowing full well that the crap will be removed within minutes, if it's even allowed through in the first place.

I just got an email from Brian Lamb to let me know that 2 of the amigos are going mano a mano in the 2004 Weblog Awards: Best Canadian Blog category.

Not sure why I got nominated over the many many (many) other excellent Canadian weblogs. But I'm flattered. I'm getting my ass kicked in the poll, but I'm flattered ;-)

Anyway, vote early, vote often. Now, if only they had the Diebold Vote Multiplier 3000 installed for this...

Brian Lamb just posted a link to the Northern Voice Conference - it looks like it's like a BloggerConCanada, which should be very cool. It's insanely cheap ($20 for pre-registration, $30 for last minute registrations). It's a one day conference, and Textuality is listed as one of the sponsors (that's Tim Bray's non-day-job).

I've been experimenting with directed server side aggregators to present the concept to a potential client. The basic goal is to provide something like EduRSS or the new EDUCAUSE blog aggregations for members of a department or faculty (or combinations thereof).

Feed on Feeds looks like a pretty lightweight and functional option. I'm running a test of it now, with a few of the Learning Commons weblogs (and those of the other Amigos so there's something for the aggregator to chew on).

Not sure how I missed this, but I just came across the EDUCAUSE | Blogs site-within-a-site while surfing Feedster to get the latest stuff from the Educause 2004 conference.

I had no idea that Cyprien Lomas was blogging - met him at the NMC2004 Summer Conference at 2004, and I'll definitely be following his blog...

The Educause Blog site looks to be pretty much what a department would need to use in order to officially adopt blogging as part of their website - a collection of bloggers and categories, with the ability to view individual bloggers or categories, or collections of any combination thereof. Very nice. They don't say what software they're using, so I don't know if it's WP, MT, or if they rolled their own...

I just nuked the Google Adsense stuff from this weblog. I had added it to see how it did with analyzing the content of various pages (along the lines of the bags-of-keywords and content-indexing memes with respect to learning objects and metadata).

The experiment was actually quite interesting and informative. Conclusions:

• It is definitely possible to effectively match content (ads) with other content (weblog posts) based on the bits within that content (and not on keywords or taxonomies applied to the outside of said content).
• The matches between content and ads are often extremely accurate, but lag by a couple of days as Google updates indexes and caches. New posts tend to have a quasi-generic ad for a day or so, and then a "real" ad kicks in
• Readers of this weblog (perhaps/not weblogs in general?) are rather task-oriented folks. They don't get distracted by ads - they are apparently here to read stuff, and don't tend to click on ads
• As a result of the previous point, Adsense isn't a viable revenue source. It wasn't intended to be - I would have donated any revenue to the Breast Cancer Foundation - but over the past several months, Adsense tracked a grand total of less than $10US. They don't pay until you hit $100US, so I would have to keep ads running for almost 2 years to see a dime from Adsense. The Adsense EULA prevents me from publishing specific details on success rates (CPM, etc..) but they were substantially less than stellar. ;-)

By the way, the conclusion of this experiment was triggered by the IT Conversations: The Future of Online Advertising (at Gnomedex 4.0) session. They got talking about "monetizing content from weblogs" and adding ads to rss feeds. It left such a bad taste in my mouth that I couldn't continue with Adsense. The talk was quite interesting (with folks from Google, Amazon, etc... talking about what they do and where they are going), but a wee bit scary.

Finally taking the time to read James Farmer's article on incsub: Communication Dynamics: Discussion boards, weblogs and the development of communities of inquiry in online learning environments.

Did a quick skim, and he's referencing the book "E-Learning in the 21st Century: A framework for research and practice" that was put together by Randy Garrison and Terry Anderson. Randy is the Director of The Learning Commons, while Terry is up at Athabasca University, and was involved with the development of CAREO.

Sometime over the weekend, this site received its 30,000th visitor since mid-2003, as recorded by SiteMeter. As I write this, it's sitting at 30,135 visitors (about 100 per day).

That's actual human visitors, with image-enabled browsers (bots and spiders aren't included in this, because they don't download the image used by SiteMeter). I'm constantly amazed that anyone comes to read what I dump here. This site began as (and continues primarily to serve as) my outboard/online brain. Persistent searchable memory. But if others find it useful, you're welcome to help yourself. That's harder to do with the stuff inside my skull (but perhaps this site is more useful to others... ;-)

I've been surfing some of the weblogs I subscribe to, poking through their blogrolls for gems I may have missed. I'm amazed at how some weblog designs are so overly complex that it can take me a minute or two of scanning a page just to find the "subscribe" link. One site I looked at had a grand total of 469 hyperlinks on the main page alone. Many were blogroll items, bookmark links etc. But they overwhelm the reader with so much superfluous data that it's difficult to find the simple single link you're looking for...

Or, in this case, from the UK. Last night 190 spam crap comments were added to this weblog (in a span of about 20 minutes).

Despite using the MT-Blacklist plugin, ported to Blosxom. I've gone through and deleted the 190 spam crap comments. I've also turned off addition of new comments to existing comment threads. It's easy to remove comment posts when they're just spam. It's harder when it's added into existing content...

Wow. Wil Wheaton just posted a bounty on the rat bastards that are crapflooding his weblog.

Yes. That Wil Wheaton. Actor. Author. Spamhunter.

The refugees from humanity decided to post kiddie porn in the comments section of his weblog. Not Nice. And he's had enough.

He's posted a $1000 bounty, to be rewarded to anyone providing info leading to the arrest and successful conviction of the crapflooders.

Good on ya, Wil! Squash those rodents...

Thanks to Al Delgado for the tip on this. There's a big education bloggers shindig in San Francisco November 22-23. Sounds like it will be quite a gathering.

I hadn't heard of (or if I've heard of it, I promptly forgot about it) the EdBloggers Network. K-12 focussed, with colleges of education participating.

I'll be keeping an eye on this group... (no, not in a scary restraining-order kind of way...)

I've updated my blogroll using the Blogroll plugin for Movabletype. It now renders directly from the .opml output from NetNewsWire... It includes a link to the .opml source.

Enjoy!

I just stumbled across this while poking around the new java.net community website.

James Gosling has started blogging. No RSS feed (yet), but it should be an interesting read.

UPDATE: There is an RSS feed, after all.

Just added a full blogroll to the right sidebar of my weblog. It's a massaged dump of my NetNewsWire subscriptions (all 102 of them). I may also add a link to an OPML export of the subscriptions, if anyone wants it.

Please don't read any relevance into the order of subscribed items... I haven't prioritized them or anything - they usually stay where they fall in the NNW subscriptions pane.

UPDATE: I posted the OPML file for the subscriptions here (also linked in the title of the Blogroll).

Just took some time to play around with the standalone trackback tool from Ben Trott. Works like a charm (once I upgraded my Perl installation).

Now, objects in CAREO have an associated URL for receiving trackback pings, as well as one for retrieving all trackbacks (if any) for that object.

Log into CAREO, and hit the button for any learning object. At the bottom of that screen will be a trackback URL, as well as a link to the existing trackback items.

This is actually pretty cool. Another great link from Dale Pike!

Technorati.com checks a boatload of weblogs, and maps the links between them. Feed it a URL, and it tells you who else links to it.

What a cool way to find people who are linking to (and, one would therefore assume interested in) the contents of a weblog.

Something like this would be a slick addition to CAREO - map which people are subscribed to a learning object, and perhaps which other objects they've subscribed to, generating some form of dynamic relationship between objects. Something like the Amazon.com "You might like..." feature...

Just came across this presentation by Dale Pike. It's a great summary of the reasons why weblogs may be valuable, and how they might be used in a community setting.