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Structured, distributed blog article starts today
I am starting something of an experiment today for the rest of this week. I am going to construct an article by structuring a debate across four blogs. The article is around the future of content and starts in my next post. The plan is: Monday – I post a piece on where I think digital content is going, arguing that it is moving towards being free and widely distributed. Tuesday – Ray Corrigan is going to post a piece responding to mine which looks at how digital rights may make it a more, not less, controlled future for content. Wednesday – Patrick McAndrew will focus it on education by…
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That Stephen Fry post
As you may have seen Stephen Fry has started a blog, and his first post was on smart phones and the iPhone in particular. It received so much traffic that it fell over and they’re currently upgrading it. That aside, several things occurred to me after reading it: i) It has to be the longest post I’ve ever read. I love this variety in blogs – they can be whatever size, tone or format you want. One of my favourite bloggers is Christopher Sessums who doesn’t post very frequently, although he does post regularly, about once a week, but his posts are always thoughtful and more akin to essays or…
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Prof in ICT post at the OU
I’ve been asked to flush out any candidates for a Professor of ICT here at the OU, in the newly formed department. Details here: http://www3.open.ac.uk/employment/job-details.asp?id=3263&ref=ext If you’re of Professorial quality (I know you’re thinking – if you’re one, how hard can it be?) come and join us, there’s lots of interesting people here (and me). Don’t contact me for any further info though – I don’t know any more than is here.
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Dylan viral marketing
(Hat tip: Stuart Brown) As you may know, I’m a sucker for viral marketing – it’s like normal marketing but fun. To promote the new Dylan Greatest Hits, they created a make your own Bob video site. You can add the text in. Here is my one:
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Listphile – a man thing?
(via Dan Taylor) I have had a play with Listphile a site that lets you (yes you’ve guessed it) create and share lists. Yes, that’s it – it never ceases to amaze me how small some of the ideas behind these web 2.0 startups are. You create a list which you can pull different media in to and others can edit it. Although it’s a small idea, you can see how this might grow. Rather like the real world, in the online world there is an almost infinite variety of very small ecological niches that some company (organism) will exploit. Making and sharing lists won’t change your life, but it…
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Teach the people – would you sign up?
Teach the People is a social networking site with an emphasis on learning. It’s not up and running yet, so I’ve registered for a beta invite. It has more of a content focus than a lot of the other sites, claiming that "Instead of just messaging with other users like on traditional social networking services, users on Teach The PeopleSM are creating their own communities for fun, education, innovation; whatever! User can then fill those communities with as much content & media as they desire" I hope it works, but I’m not sure myself, and this was based on my initial reaction – I didn’t instantly get the point as…
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Shaming yourself in to action
I like this: in an attempt to shame himself into losing weight, Kerry Buckley has a Big Visible Belly graph showing on his blog, which shows his fluctuation around his ideal weight – over and it records in red and under it shows in green. This use of the blog to expose some aspect of yourself to the audience and thus force action got me thinking. What else could you use it for? I would probably like to record my running, with a weekly target. But anything you procrastinate over would be a contender – you could go for study hours, progress through Remembrance of Things Past, number of alcohol…
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Facebook and Twitter – the status wars
I’ve decided to give Twitter another go (you can see it on the sidebar there if you’re reading this in the blog). What inspired me was a couple of posts – from David Warlick who relates how Twitter was used at a conference and Ewan McIntosh who asks for the Twitter details of people attending the Scottish Learning Festival, so they can create a page of reflections on the conference. It seemed to me that maybe having a Twitter identity was a professional requirement, a component of the essential modern identity an educational technologist should construct. But my problem is I’ve tried before and not established it as a habit…
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The nature, and limit, of friends
My (real) friend from university, Will Reader, has done some research on Facebook friends recently, which the Guardian and others have picked up on. They are all running it as an ‘online friends aren’t real’ type story. But I think this isn’t what Will was saying. What he actually says is "Although the numbers of friends people have on these sites can be massive, the actual number of close friends is approximately the same in the face to face real world," Previous research suggests that the maximum number of friends you could manage socially or cognitively was around 150, known as Dunbar’s number. What Will’s research was doing was looking…
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Why headlines don’t matter
A few people have blogged about this report from the Project for Excellence in Journalism. They compared what constituted the headlines for online stories, and traditional media. They put it like this: If someday we have a world without journalists, or at least without editors, what would the news agenda look like? How would citizens make up a front page differently than professional news people? Which they did by looking at the top stories on sites such as Digg compared with those from traditional providers. The takeaway (amongst some interesting stuff) is "In a week when the mainstream press was focused on Iraq and the debate over immigration, the three…
