OK, so before you start, you can read that in different ways, and it made you look didn’t it. Exactly.

But I have to say, it was refreshing to hear Simon Chen calling it as it is and expressing something that I’ve been waffling on about over beers for some time but never here… WTF is it about Second Life and Twitter?

Sure, I get the fact that it’s nice, and very addictive, to get and send texts all the time, and that you can form a closer relationship with a community (or join in with a community) via that, but even on that front it just doesn’t grab me.

And it’s not really micro-blogging, because it’s not really publishing… it’s more like micro-email.

Same with Second Life… it’s full of whizz-bang FX, and again it’s got a very addictive quality (speaking as an old skool Sim City-er!), but fundamentally it does little for me except remind me of hanging out in a chat room all those years back, with voice.

Besides, it’s even more screwed than Twitter as it’s entire model depends on people using an alternative environment, at least Twitter has the web / phone thing just about right.

For my $0.02 I don’t think you’re too old Simon, I think it’s just a matter of taste… whereas facebook, blogging and web apps  (although I’m not too sure about Mahalo :) have a kind of universal appeal, dare I say to be subverted as you wish, and can slip into anyone’s pocket, the specific thing about SL and the big ‘T’ is that they aren’t.

They’re geared towards very specific audiences, and for those audiences, they’re the best thing since sliced bread. They get hooked, and this is why (I suspect) we get to hear so very much about them.

Which isn’t to say that they’re not worthwhile, just that it’d be nice to hear slightly less about them.

But then, addictions can be very consuming.

A request for help!

Am looking for a decent FTP synching application for XP (or a dedicated LAMP server) that’ll allow me to keep multiple FTP accounts (let’s say 100 to start with) synchronized with a set of data on my laptop (or said server).

So far (on the XP front)  I’ve found FTP Synchronizer and Multi FTP Sync so will give them a play, if you’ve got ay suggestions please let me know in the comments and I’ll give them a shot and report the results here.

Thanx :)

Grrrr… Firefox has been crashing for me at least twice a day (sometimes many more times) since updating to 2.0.0.11 on XP and it looks like I’m not the only one.

Coupled to massive memory use am not enjoying FF as much as I used to and am even to be occasionally found slipping into IE7 use (gasp).

C’mon Mozilla, sort it out!

Update: Alicia Wyatt posts a quick ‘how to’ (and associated issues) for moving from EduSpaces to edublogs.

Shame that Ben and Dave couldn’t manage to keep eduspaces running.

(incidentally, if any eduspaces users want help moving over to edublogs then please feel free to email support (at) edublogs /dot/ org for assistance)

I have to say I was a little surprised by the gratitude expressed by their soon-to-be-non-users - I’d expect, personally, to be run out of town with a pitchfork in my rear end but perhaps that’s just me ;)

Still, I think it’ll be very interesting to look at the whys and wherefores of what made the site initially successful and then less so as and if Dave and Ben publish them.

My suspicions are that it was essentially a site based around a very specific community - and any community-centric site has a serious cap on the number of users it can support and all the associated issues prevalent with communities over time. What it needed to be was an educational version of Ning or Yahoo Groups, but that’s no easy task (I can tell you!), in that it could have operated as a service, as much as a community. But heck, I could be completely wrong, let’s wait to hear what they have to say.

Also of particular interest is Tom’s comment:

“Something else I keep trying to warn you about. And yes, it will happen to Blogmeister eventually. It has to.”

To which I’m not sure I agree (and left a comment asking for more info.) What’s the ‘has to’ element here? Please explain :)

[I should also note, just for the record, that edublogs continues to go from strength to strength... we completed a split over the weekend so that the site now runs off over 4000 databases (same as wp.com), are about to do a very fancy upgrade, and have some pretty exciting plans for 2008 including new partners and functionality... we're not going anywhere, so don't even think it!]

I haven’t done a stats related post for ages, well, an unrelated to edublogs.org one at least, so this is kinda fun.

So, you wanna run a blog awards huh? Fancy you’ll get a bot of traffic do ya? Well, you’d be right… but not perhaps where you might first expect.

The background to this is the shift of The Edublog Awards (in their fourth year) from the somewhat dubious URL of incsub.org/awards to the rather more snappy edublogawards.com.

The process was split into three stages, nominations of blogs for the awards over a few weeks (we received over 500 via an email contact form… nice barrier!), voting over a couple of weeks and then the announcement of the winners.

Nominating not a big deal:

While there was some initial interest in the awards (new domain, graphic design etc.) the actual nomination process, despite garnering many many links out of pretty significant mavens in edublogosphere-land didn’t exactly test the servers ;)

On a related note one of the biggest whinges seems to have been ‘I didn’t know about these’… so perhgaps it was a marketing thing, none of them have any excuses next year though!!!

Shortlists big, voting quite big, results kinda small:

However, as you can see once the shortlisted blogs were announced (about 70 of them) things got a bit more busy!

Voting went on for two weeks and I reckon the dip for the second week might have a lot to do with me making the ongoing results invisible (oops… I thought it’d attract more action;).

Perhaps the most interesting element is the last 3 spots on the graph… as that’s straight after the winners being announced. Sure it was all done in Second Life and on Audio etc. but it’s hardly the burst you’d imagine. Again, perhaps a bit down to tired organisers, lack of marketing push etc.

So in conclusion:

The process of nominating has to be easier and more fun too… perhaps a mini vote in itself, or maybe something like the Mashable blog-partners thing?

Announcing the shortlist is really crucial and that’s when you really want to pay attantion… better (and more) badges as well as code snippets for people to copy into sidebars would be good. Some tools to allow people to promote directly from the site (import webmail stuff?) could work well.

Don’t shut off the developing results, even if it does make the awards party more fun :)

In that vein, announce the winners on teh site first, get a day or so out of that (i.e. steer more traffic and links to the site) and then have a party… that way, as everyone knows who’s won it’ll be more fun… right?

Any other ideas?

There are a not a great deal of excellent webby get togethers in Melbourne, but there are three that I’ve been to and will probably carry on going to… if they weren’t all on the same frickin night!

Come on guys, this is getting ridiculous… tomorrow is MODM 8, Melbourne’s Twitter meetup and Melbourne Web standards Group (WSG) (featuring me :)

Now, much as the prospect of a cross-CBD geek crawl appeals to me this is patently silly, WTF is so special about the first Thursday of every month?

Anyways, make you’re own mind up which one you want to go to but please heckle the organizers of each to changes their silly dates.

MODM

WSG

MTUB

Every now and then we get a support request for a ‘CommentPress Plugin’ and we kindly remind them that it’s not a plugin, but a theme, and that it’s already available on edublogs (and all the student sites).

As Alan comments, it’s a ’slick, elegant, and powerful way to put papers online’ - however, it’s also only available to educators and students who can set up their own WP installs…. unless they come to edublogs where you can get it for absolutely free, without any advertising whatsoever and with plenty of complementary plugins and spam stopping measures built in.

I was actually pretty shocked at the lack of w00t value deploying this initially got… maybe it was just a communication thing… either way it rocks and you can try it out for yourselves at you know where.

Just not late Friday night US time today as we’ll be splitting databases :)

Fray, the pioneering storytelling site, is back and back with aplomb is a rather beautiful web / quarterly hybrid.

This edition is called Busted and is, as ever, beautifully illustrated.

You can subscribe to the print version for as little as $15 a year.

Me, I’m getting the T-Shirt… literally :)

Great example of where web / paper subscription hybrids can go and I reckon they’ll clean up.

Well, that was significantly more work than in 2004!!!

Voting is now on for the 2007 edublog awards.

You can check out the full list of brilliant nominees here.

Heh, quite right:

On the face of it, this seems to prove that half-cocked punditry trumps personal storytelling and helpful essays, at least where traffic magnetism is concerned.

Now, what was I saying about the web being no different to anything else, really ;)

On the day that *hopefully* we unsubscribe from the suckhole who took Australia into this nonsense, why not unsubscribe from the ongoing abuse.

Today I have mostly been editing 80+ WordPress themes to include tags in them.

It’s been a riot ;)

Stephen quotes Michael’s summary of the D2L rubrics, specifically:

“Every competency has at least one learning objective under it. In turn, every learning objective has at least one assessment which is the actual instrument for checking to see if students have met the learning objective.”

And asks:

“But can the objectives of learning be reduced (for that’s what this is, a reductive process) to competences?”

To which I would deign to answer… they certainly can, but they certainly shouldn’t be.

I speak from some experience having worked with and alongside teachers working on what surely must hold the world record for the most competencies ever stuffed into a single course, the otherwise admirable Adult Migrant English Program.

So rammed with point, sub-point, sub-sub-point and paperwork is the program that the (often extremely experienced) teachers would shake their heads, randomly tick a few boxes (isn’t ’satisfactory’ a great option) and, if at all possible, try to work around the nonsense into something vaguely resembling a decent learning experience.

It’s deadening, but, as and decent educational marketer knows it’s most of the time what the administrators and bureaucrats running education are after

Measurables… mmmm.

Schema… oooooooo.

Methodologies so prescribed as to ensure 100% accountability and control over these pesky, individual, disorganised, independent teachers… ahhhhhhh.

And as the teachers aren’t going to be making decisions about their OLE, CMS, VLE, LMS or WETFYWTCI, it makes perfect sense for D2L to go straight to the top and give them exactly what they want.

Now, I’m not saying that we shouldn’t have goals, or assessments, or that all curricula should be torn up and burnt in a pile as we dance round it whooping and drinking hard liquor (although that might be one sort of step forward ;) but for heavens sake, let’s not swamp teachers already weighed down by paperwork stuffed with this stuff with technology that is equally anti-learning.

Well, I gotta say that I was pretty pleased with how WordCamp Melbourne 2007 turned out.

Sure, it was a little warm, and not quite dark enough to see the slides well and there were a few flies (strewth mate, we were downunder!) but I reckon that the turnout was just right, the speakers excellent, the roundtables interesting and engaging and the beer cold.

Lots of nice pictures are up on Flickr and hopefully we’ll have some video soon too - which I’ll post up on the main blog.

Thanks to everyone who came… and looking forward to the next one :)

Update: OMG there we go !!! Now… the question is whether I satisfy the notability guidelines… yoikes… apparently that means:

“If you are familiar with the subject matter, please expand or rewrite the article to establish its notability. The best way to address this concern is to reference published, third-party sources about the subject”

So, ahem, feel free to do so ;)

My little sister’s Wikipedia page is filling up nicely, and I have no doubt my even littler sister will get one soon too.

And I get a mention too, ahem, “She has a younger sister, Laura Farmer and an older brother James Farmer.”

But alas… no link is there for her poor brother, no article chronicling his groundbreaking work, no… sob… Wikipedia love.

Who, he cries, who might change that?

(image from Chapter)

;)

Movable Type 4 is out and going for the “social media sites” angle.

Having worked extensively with version 3 at The Age it’s very different to WPMU in a whole heap of ways… and I reckon it’s time for someone with less - ahem - bias than me to do a decent side-by-side (possibly chucking in Drupal and Elgg for god measure?)

Any other software that really ought to feature?

That’s right, no ethics at all :)

More, um, accurately though there are no places left, we’re full, and you’ll need to get in touch with us if you still want to come and haven’t signed up on Upcoming.

The full schedule for the day is available now too (.pdf).

Update: A very helpful bloglines engineer got in touch with me and they’ve applied a special script to set up  a combined rate limit for 10 requests per second for the edublogs domain. Seems to be working nicely so far so you’re back in the good books Bloglines ;)

A year on Bloglines continues to misbehave attempting to make hundreds to simultaneous connections through it’s crawler to WPMU hosts like edublogs - causing slowness and even crashing even on brand new clusters.

They don’t respond to emails about it and the only solution seems to be to limit their IP (65.214.44.29) to something like 20-40 concurrent connections - naturally massively slowing down the updates that get through.

It stinks and if they don’t do something about it we’re going to actively start asking the 100K+ users of edublogs sites to use Google Reader and discourage their readers /subscribers from using bloglines in favour of another RSS reader.

It’s a real shame as they were pioneers of web based aggregators and I used them for years but to be honest I’ve had enough.

Better hurry over to Upcoming to register for WordCamp Melbourne as there are technically only 6 places left!

If the great list of speakers and topics and beer doesn’t tempt you (how could it not!) then there are also lots of lovely goodies to be had… purely for turning up.

Just posted this on The Edublog Awards site. There have been over 300 nominations so far but I reckon people need to think outside the box a bit :)

“Also, let’s get imaginative people! Probably 50% of the many hundreds of nominations so far are for ‘best teacher’ - whatabout best designed, best individual, best newcomer, best post and best paper… going for a niche you’re strong in will seriously increase your chances of making it through to the shortlist.”

There’s so much being written about the proposed wp.com theme marketplace that coming back from a few days offline (not even a working mobile!) any contribution to the debate has probably already been covered and I’m kinda off the boil anyway. But what the heck…

I reckon it’s a nice idea. ‘Nice’ in a whole heap of ways.

Nice work (if you can get it): Wp.com have a massive community of users, they’ve worked hard and invested a lot of money into this community - they’re now saying ‘hey, howabout you come and assist the site with good stuff in exchange for $’, now that isn’t exactly a new concept.

Nice GPL: Sweet, more support for people making great GPL themes that the rest of us can use or supply to others through Edublogs etc.

Nice cover: I actually didn’t really agree with the whole removing sponsored themes thing - it was getting a bit ugly but it was a way for talented theme designers to get paid - but this would more than make up for it… and it’s based on quality rather than sheer promotion.

Nice ‘facebook’ nice: Now, when facebook or myspace or whoever opens up APIs then they’re not doing this out of sheer altruism… but I don’t hear people getting all upset over that.

Sure it’ll (further) help turn Automattic into a very successful purchase or IPO, sure wp.com is a serious business (but, you can’t deny the blatantly obvious benefits of this to all WP users!) and sure we all love a conspiracy theory or several - me more than most ;) - but I reckon this is damn nice idea… extend it to upgrades too!

This time more smartly attired… how do you think my emerging video presence is coming along ;)

Donncha’s just announced the release of WordPress Super Cache (which we’ve been lucky enough to do some testing on).

It’s an absolutely massive plugin as it essentially takes the (already excellent) WP-Cache plugin and, for want of a better word, Movable Types it.

So, now when a page is cached it’s really cached in terms of static html files being served straight from your webserver.

And it’s even WPMU compatible.

So now WordPress will perform as well or better than any other blogging engine for high traffic sites… in every respect!

Great work Donncha… here’s the official plugin page.

Sue’s got a very interesting post up talking about ownership and online communities - asks some good questions too, go check it out.