Inside View from Ireland

Sunday News to Serve Classroom Discussions

I AM USING a time-tested pocket media process to record my take of Irish Sunday news in HD quality because I want to show creative multimedia students how to prepare broadcast-quality clips for radio and television.

As the photo shows, I simultaneously use Audioboo with an iPod Touch and the Sony Ericsson Xperia Arc's exceptional low-light intelligent zoom video camera. When I run both of these devices together and give them two separate upchannel hosts, I can normally get a 5-minute clip up and announced on YouTube within 15 minutes of finishing my clip. This is a major accomplishment for me because all the work is done on the phone or by server-side processing. In my experience, the speed and reliability of the cloud services now allows me to finish creative work with students well inside the two hours of practical work scheduled on our third level timetable.

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Samples: http://audioboo.fm/topgold for audio and http://youtube.com/topgold for video.

blogging

They Know Me by My Photostreams

PHOTO-SHARING APPS command riveting attention on social networking sites, something an analysis of my Flickr photostream documents. With more than 700 people visiting my Flickr collection every day, it's an important adjunct to my online presence.

I am trying to illustrate every blog post with an image from my Flickr collection and I am trying to optimise the sidebar content on my blog with fast-loading thumbnails drawn from Flickr. I know some visitors like to come and look--just look at images--and then they leave my blog behind. Sometimes a well-illustrated blog post keeps visitors looking for more than 15 seconds.

My most popular image of 2011, with more than 14,000 views in 2011, is a screenshot describing How to Lose a Job on Facebook. The stats on my other frequently-viewed photos pale by comparison.

Reconfiguring While Nobody Visits

I USED MY NOKIA E7 to chat with Blacknight Solutions several times while trying to reconfigure DNS accounts for my blog. I talked to the techs while simultaneously making server-side edits using the same phone (at left).

I want to finish 2011 with a minor reconfiguration of my blog, something I try to do when nobody is around. But Christmas 2011 is serving up a trickle of people with tech questions about things they found under the tree. My blog posts are helping people set up an iTunes account as though they are in the States, recover memory to Sony Xperia Arc handsets, and dive into new Kindles.

I could use some technical help too because the legacy control panel I have with Blacknight Solutions won't let me configure CNAME records in the syntax required to keep my blog together. And because of that snag, if you try to click below the fold on one of my older posts, you'll probably see a dead page.

Remembering Scobleizer's First Tsunami

I EXPERIENCED MY FIRST Scobleizer tsunami while watching an actual event in parallel ravage Sri Lanka seven years ago. And if Jeremiah Owyang is right, millions of us won't share the vantage point of articulate bloggers anymore.

Owyang believes the world is witnessing the Golden Age of Tech Blogging. He may be right on one level because the plumbing of blogging has changed. We no longer need to depend on RSS feed aggregators to hear about big natural events or seismic changes in world politics. The information percolates across social networks that did not exist when I watched the Indian Ocean tsunami on a plasma screen in Berlin while simulataneously reading about it on Scoble's blog on my Nokia 9210. And I didn't read Jeremiah's thoughts on a blog. They came as a Google Plus post to my Sony Xperia Arc while I was in an Irish chip shop. Nothing goes better than a little salt, vinegar and owyang with fresh fried Irish potatoes. I learn things from Jeremiah Owyang and agree with the third point he makes about the Golden Age of Tech blogging.

From Sites to Blogs to Twitter to Notifications

AFTER 10 YEARS BLOGGING AND FIVE YEARS TWEETING, I have watched my personal information flow migrate from scraping sites, to reading blog RSS feeds, to watching Twitter nominate content to letting my phone notify me of important content in my online networks. Meanwhile, dozens of State agencies remain stuck in portal mentality bunkers.

A few years ago, I listened to Pat Quirke, local estate agent from  PFQ.ie, explain the evolution of his business from a brochure site to a blog and onto Twitter. He regaled an audience with stories from three generations back during a Clonmel Chamber of Commerce event in Tippperary Institute. 

I have watched the Irish web evolve since teaching creative multimedia students in the Arthouse in 1996. If I was teaching web dev today, I'd be stuck into HTML 5, Twitter widgets and Facebook newsfeeds. Using Twitter gives business owners a direct and elegant way of sending messages immediately to people who want them. Using Facebook pushes newsy items straight onto hundreds of handsets, often with little chimes to alert people to their arrival. This is truly an evolution in how we manage information and it's very commonplace today.

Comment Spam Round 17

I USED TO SET ASIDE up to 20 minutes every day to clean a minimum of 300 comment spams arising from overnight visitors. That onerous task evaporated nearly two years ago with better moderation queue filters. Looking back on past write-ups I made about fighting comment spam, I remember using a manual clean-up routine along with tying in unwelcome IPs for blocking.

It feels very relaxing nowadays, knowing most of the comments on this blog are actually continuations of conversation. This online medium is better for improved comment spam prevention.

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Four Years Ago: "Comment Spam Round 13" on September 30, 2006.

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Thinking about Chris Gulker

I GLANCE INTO Chris Gulker's online space once a day, hoping he's still there because now he's on borrowed time. I still marvel at Chris' photography, his writing and his world view. I'm one of many who wonder how he's doing. Chris writes, "A number of readers have have been encouraging me to “write something,” if only to reassure them that I’m still here. Short answer is yup, we’re still answering the phone, as it were, at least when we can get to it, mobility being what it is."

When I moved into a new home in Ireland, I noticed the mandatory features that make it accessible to wheel chairs. And I also noticed all the little things that get in the way of a wheelchair, even at the ground level. Our home would affect Chris, even though he's "still good from the neck up, thought the left side continues its slide." He explains, "I’m in a wheelchair more often, now, if only because it makes Linda feel better, and still very grateful for the hemi-walker that Heidi found for me. Either way, the wheelchair ramp is a very welcome help.

"The biggest difficulty I face now is the approximately 5-inch tall curb that surrounds my shower. A 3-year old can step over it effortlessly, but my increasingly paralyzed left leg can do so only with great difficulty – a situation which isn’t getting better. Linda has to help me get out of the shower all of the time now… we’re waiting for an assistive grab pole that may be a help."

Here's hoping the best for Chris Gulker in the challenging days ahead.

"Just making our way…"

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Photo from Chris Gulker, spotted yesterday "writing something".

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Reflecting through Writing

Listen

SO MUCH OF MY ONLINE WORLD is full of people with the need for self-expression and it shouldn't be difficult for me to nurture that motivation in students who take the creative multimedia module at Tipperary Institute. I've structured a few continuous assessment activities that are designed to reveal facets of personalities and hope to share some of the most interesting items on my blog. As I've learned since my blogging started in 2001, writing in an online journal is not merely churning out a collection of links--that worked in the early days. If people behind Storyful, Paper.li, Flipboard and My6sense are right, blogging has taken on a curatorial essense. I use my blogging as a method of constructing knowledge and critically appraising sources. I'm also turning Inside View into a place where I consider thoughts for course projects as well as a place to archive literature study and extracts from reflective journals. When students know they're expected to share in public, the voice they give to their writing style changes. And persona students produce deeper considerations for thoughts they share. I'm looking forward to what might evolve here on my blog. My greatest hope is that by its 10th anniversary next September, a new tone of voice will have emerged.

Creatively Blogging

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Evolving to Public and Private Edublogging

I AM EVOLVING my blog into public and private education channels this month because I am sitting next to highly-qualified contributors in my third level creative multimedia classrooms at Tipperary Institute. A quick review of several profiles attached to our bountiful first year entry cohort suggests many of those new students would be qualified for work during the running of the first academic year. And since I think Work Comes First, I want to attribute exemplary samples of work with direct contact details and watch the nixers evolve. Because the concept of blogging has evolved to a stream of consciousness powered by Posterous or a list of favourites cached by Twitter, it will be simple work creating a hive of public discussions written by Media Writing, Social Media and Public Relations students. Some of their work will be supplemented by private Qik clips, Audioboo snippets in a stream of conversation and Flickr photostreams nestled into thematic groups. After they complete their video module, I expect screencasts and online HD clips will follow. I'm excited by the confidence I have in accessing all this free infrastructure and I'm empowered by knowing that my Dell M2400 laptop can crawl and harvest public blog segments with little active participation by myself. Stay tuned for the story as it evolves.

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Inspired by Ewan McIntosh and the tactics he kindly shares. More: "Change the Script", 5 October 2005.

Bonus Link Josie Fraser's slideshow of education by faces, places and mugs.

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Darraghdoyle Might See

OCCASIONAL READER Darragh Doyle may see this short blog post because he uses Twitter to graze Irish blogs. This clever process happens because of bosca, an Irish aggregator that monitors content related to Ireland and then pushes out short summaries of the blog items as tweets. I think it's useful to aggregate bosca, then to read dozens of Irish blog summaries in each refresh of your blog reader. I get bosca aggregates delivered to my mobile phone and up to 40 line summaries hit my phone every time I open FreeNews, the Java-powered news reader that runs on my Nokia E90. I'm interested in seeing whether Darragh Doyle, an astute blogger in Ireland, will spot his name in this post and then click over to this blog item from his twitterstream. I'll only know for sure if he drops by and leaves behind a comment.