Inside View

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.

Adsense on Steroids

YOU CAN BET that Google Adsense will pay more for video advertising placement than for text ads on websites. Now that Google is testing advertising for video, the natural by-product will be a revenue sharing with content producers. I have to get a new laptop so that I'm able to play in this new space.

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Saul Hansell -- "Google is testing ads for video service"
Robert Scoble -- "Another reason I'm getting into the video business"

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Blogs Sell Servers

ROBERT SCOBLE cites Netcraft's conclusion concerning one of the effects of weblogs. "The Internet experienced its strongest site growth ever last month, powered by a surge in blogs and free Web sites." This is helping Microsoft, as the Netcraft survey documents.

"Microsoft continues to gain share in the web server market, chipping away at Apache's commanding lead. The number of hostnames on Windows servers grew by 4.5 million, giving Microsoft 29.7% market share, a gain of 4.25% for the month. Apache had a decline of 429K hostnames, and loses 3.5% to  61.25%."

Connecting Typepad to Feedburner

CONNECTING A TYPEPAD blog to Feedburner takes less than 20 seconds if you're signed into your Typepad blog. Go to the blog you want to connect, edit your blog's configuration, click the radio button to indicate you want to connect your feed through Feedburner, log into your Feedburner account, select the blog feed you want to redirect through Feedburner and you're done. This set-up changes nothing for existing feed readers--Feedburner merely tracks their downloads on the Typepad server. This is a clever Typepad service. It tells you more than you think you need to know. It suggests content for podcasts. It can track downloads of enclosures. In general, I like Typepad more than the Wordpress installation I use on other sites because Six Apart's servers are more robust than the community servers I use elsewhere. Six Apart's spam controls are much stronger than anything else I've used or seen used in Irish blogspace.

Dad's Blog 1950

KILKENNY -- While rummaging through some stuff prior to moving to a building site, I stumbled upon some things I hoarded from a travelogue that my dad kept from the late-40s. He began taking photos back then and he kept his film in an ammo box that was clipped to the side of his company car (an Army jeep) while he meandered around the ravaged countryside of Bavaria during the Marshall Plan days of Germany. Parts of his travelogue (a 50s-style blog) included pictures of the Muslim community in Munich.