Inside View

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.

Auditing Trends for Growth

Bernie Goldbach in Cashel | Screenshot from Typepad 

IT'S TIME TO REALIGN some of the properties I have online to give them a more sustainable foundation.

David Armano proposes a starting point.

11890 With Helpful Maps

Bernie Goldbach in Cashel | Image of Lumia

WHEN I ASK 11890 directory assistance for a phone number, it's a 30 second transaction that now includes a map.

I've rang a few times from my mobile phone (in the photo) to see cross-check a few things, like the name of our college (it's recently changed) or the new phone numbers of businesses we like to use. The service is always fast, always accurate. I normally say something like, "Maura, could you text me a business phone number for Beva in Glanmire, County Cork?" The reaction is as fast as a person can type and rarely longer than 20 seconds. That's 20 seconds from the time I start to ask to the time a text arrives on my phone. And now, the text comes with a map that's more accurate than I get with Foursquare.

Learn #howtobeirish via Twitter

YOU'RE INVITED to tweet along with a half-hour interview @rickoshea is doing on #howtobeirish by simply listening to the hashtag starting at 4:30pm Dublin time on 15 March. I'm planning to learn a lot.

I've Irish genes (proof at left in the offspring) and am sincerely interested in some of the inside story behind the user-generated documentary airing this Saturday night at 7:30 on RTE One TV. If anyone knows the inside story about people sharing their secret hints about being Irish, it's Rick O'Shea. He has a special way of integrating radio, television and Twitter. I'm joining Rick on the #howtobeirish hashtag while tweeting this week from the @ireland account on Twitter.

I already know the RTÉ show  features submissions from Columbia, Finland, New York, London, Guatamala, New Zealand. According to the programme guide, it captures random feelings, images, songs, observations, jokes and special moments that sum up, in the minds of the contributors, what it means to be Irish."

The Applied Communications students taking LIT's BSc in Creative Multimedia will be participating in the process, learning how Rick sourced and vetted material was shot on a variety of stills cameras, webcams, video cameras, camcorders and mobile phones.

I really like Rick O'Shea's work and I'm looking forward to seeing via Saorview a lot of "funny, touching, awe-inspiring and strange responses" that make me proud to be part of the Irish gene pool.

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RTE Television -- How to be Irish

ireland

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