We’ve just introduced a new feature to edublogs, simple email subscription.

All you have to do is drag the ‘Email Subscription’ widget to your sidebar (or sidebar of choice) and readers will automatically be able to easily subscribe to your blog by email (and manage their subscriptions to any edublogs blog)

It’s not ‘official’ yet (will make a splash in edublogs.org about it next week) so if anyone wants to have a look at it, test it, share any ideas they might have or generally fool aroudn with it… and let us know how you go… that’d be much appreciated!

You can leave any feedback below or on the forums.

WTF is this about?

From the ABC: Conroy announces mandatory internet filters to protect children.

Surely this is some sort of bad joke… it’s more Howard than Howard.

“If people equate freedom of speech with watching child pornography, then the Rudd-Labor Government is going to disagree.”

Bud I thought this was to stop children stumbling across porn???

Vote for Toni (and WP of course).

And next year for me :)

How odd, just back from a nice break and browsing my stats to see how many hits I’m getting from the new movie (starring Denzel Washington as a much worthier James Farmer than I!) and I noticed that I’m getting quite a few ‘eduspaces’ queries so ran a search on them and, kaboom, there I am at the top… and there’s eduspaces.net at, well, about number 60!

Which…. and I’m entering into the lands of wild speculation here (I’m also tired and have had a couple of beers, so could well be completely wrong!) would seem to indicate that google has in some way put the kabosh on them… if not just recently then in the last month or two.

I know all about this having been (I finally figured out) kaboshed by google for WPMU theme packs ;)

So what’s going on here? Just a switch of owners or a dodgy SEO play?

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