Inside View

First Mention of Blogs: 2 Aug 99

THE FIRST MAINSTREAM PUBLICATION to mention the word "blogs" was The New York Times on August 2, 1999. While blogging has receded as a touchpoint for everyday discussion, services like WordPress continue offering compelling reasons to host content on the open internet instead of behind closed apps such as Instagram and Facebook.

Learning Vicariously @chris_byrne @Johntierney_

ELEVEN YEARS AGO, I abandoned Twitter as a firehose and started using it as a list-based process. I follow people on lists and dive into content based on hashtags or recommendations. Both Chris Byrne and John Tierney continue to be proof-positive that rewards follow people who share.

Careful with that ax @EOLoughlin #DataAnalytics

Photo from DIT e-learning summer school

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SEVEN YEARS AGO, I marveled at the YouTube tutorials Eugene O'Loughlin was churning out. I listened as he shared his experiences with a packed room during DIT's e-learning Summer School in 2013. Eugene often recorded his lectures beforehand and posted them on YouTube. After every lecture period at the National College of Ireland, Eugene would return to his office to often discover 100 more people had viewed his material online than had listened to him in the lecture hall.

Last week, Eugene O'Loughlin finished packing up Room 3.21 in the National College of Ireland. And today he retired from teaching.

10 Years After Winning Blog Award

TEN YEARS AFTER winning "Best Technology Blog" in Ireland, I'm still surprised at how quickly the wind went out of the sails of blogging. The world no longer has an appetite for long form meandering commentaries now that Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram have provided the main highways of connectivity.

Using LinkedIn with Aspiring Sports Managers

Image from Shane Gloster's "Hurling on Tour" post.

AN EFFECTIVE ONLINE presence yields results so I ask third level students to prepare LinkedIn profiles for review by friends, lecturers and potential employees. Several interesting LinkedIn profiles emerged during the 2015-16 academic  year and the work offers a starting point for the next group of digital media students who will begin building their ePortfolios in a few month's time.

Starting a 60 Day Experiment

BECAUSE I BELIEVE there is value to collaborative work, I'm beginning a group experiment with my personal blog during the fourth quarter of 2015. If you're one of the 1123 regular subscribers, you will start to see a flow of content from three separate student cohorts--I hope you stay around and absorb the content.

Behind the scenes, three web analysts (below) will watch what's happening and provide three separate reports on what they can measure in terms of the value of a shared online space.

Photo of the #measureit Slack Team.

Chuffed with @YMTfm on Blog Awards Ireland Shortlists

Photo of Youth Media Team with Junior Minister for Education.

THE YOUTH MEDIA TEAM (YMT.fm), a group of young Irish students mentored by staff in LIT-Tipperary, earned three different nominations in the 2014 Shortlist of Blog Awards Ireland. It's a lovely accomplishment and one that the YMT.fm crew deeply appreciates.

An enthusiastic group of young Junior Cycle Irish students, have interviewed Irish thought leaders during major education events throughout the past 15 months. The Youth Media Team started with baby steps during the May 2013 ICT in Education Conference in Thurles. After a deep immersion at Feilte, they learned to script their own interviews before recording short audio with iPad Minis (provided by LIT) and Lumia phones (provided by Microsoft). Then they publish short commentary at YMT.fm, embedding five to 20 minute audio interviews via the streaming Audioboo.fm service. At past events, some of the students' work complemented RTE Digital. A few audio clips have recorded several hundred plays.

I Decided to Use My Audioboo Voice

Bernie Goldbach in LIT-Clonmel | Logo from Audioboo  

ONE OF THE BIGGEST changes in blogging during the past 10 years is the emergence of ways to use multimedia technologies when extending thoughts to different communities. I give a lot of credit to Audioboo for adding a new dimension to blogging.

Audio blogging on Audioboo is simpler than taking a phone call because you don't need to talk to anyone while you're recording a Boo. However, some of the best Audioboos in my news flow are conversational. I listen to a core group of people in the Audioboo community because they either record conversations or they create Audioboos in response to on-going threads.

After six months of consistently listening to other people, I've started making and sharing three minute audio clips every other day. A lot of the time, I write information in the ID3 tags of those Audioboos and sometimes include hashtags along with related hyperlinks. It's rather easy to copy the descriptions I create for those Audioboos and paste them into the "compose" portion of my blogging software.

And I've started doing that already, wondering if my practice of doing that means I am part of an evolutionary movement in blogging.

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Posted from my iPad via the Typepad app and saved as part of my audio links.

Watching Our Four Year Old Audio Blogger

Bernie Goldbach in Cashel | Screenshot from Audioboo  

IF I HAD a speech-to-text conversion running on my Audioboo account, our four year old would have a full-fledged blog.

As it is, she already knows how to find the purple Audioboo icon on the iPod Touch and the Motorola Xoom and she has shown her after-school activities co-ordinator how to use the program. In some parts of the Audioboo community, that makes her an audio blogger. She's already part of a playlist.

I think Mia's ease of audio journaling marks an important evolution of blogging. As the vloggers have said all along, blogging isn't just for texters. Syndicated story-telling across audio channels also deserves to be given full recognition as part of the blogging movement. But it is probably too emergent a communications channel to be noticed by web awards organizers.

Miaboo

Nine Years Ago I Followed @eirepreneur

Bernie Goldbach in Clonmel | Logo from Typepad  

NINE YEARS AGO, I followed James Corbett onto Typepad. It marked an evolution in the way I share and write.

Since 1997, I've dabbled in different forms of journaling online. I lurked on LiveJournal, posted 100 things on Blogger, spent four years with Radio UserLand and hung Movable Type scripts on an Irish server for three active years. Then in mid-2003, I started pushing text onto Typepad's servers.

I like Typepad because it's so simple. I like Typepad because it costs me less than EUR 150 annually for unlimited storage, unlimited bandwidth and really good webstats. I know I need to get back into hand-rolling clever CSS. I also want to show that I can set up and execute JQuery with photosets that will probably appear in the side bar of InsideView.ie.

Blogging has evolved since 2003 with the most notable facet being the number of Irish people who no longer use blogs as their main watering holes. Instead, the voices I used to read in the 2003-2008 time frame now express themselves in 140 characters on Twitter. They've very clever smartphones that allow them to avoid typing on a laptop. Some of them might read this blog post as a short headline on Twitter or they might get it as a newsfeed through an app. But my audience will never return to 1000 page views a day, like it was prior to 2009. However, a combination of views on all the other networks I inhabit (Google Plus, Flickr, Slideshare, YouTube, Audioboo, Feedburner) keep the reach of my ideas well into four digits every day.

But so much of all that other activity starts here on my blog, like it has nearly every day since mid-2003.

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Previously: The Typepad Medium", July 10, 2003.

Bernie Goldbach likes blogging.