I don’t know where Compete gets its data from (as opposed to Alexa – which I guess is the Amazon toolbar) but when it comes to them tracking Edublogs, one of them is correct and one of them isn’t.

While our stats show us as doing better than Compete has us doing (in the US), the growth rate is pretty much spot on:

Alexa, however, is completely off the mark:

Maybe it’s got something to do with schools not having many Amazon toolbars or maybe it’s something else… but I can tell you categorically that one of these graphs is correct, and the other one is far from being so.

Phew, well after quite a bit of work (I can tell you) the 2007 edition of The Knowledge Tree is now live!

To give us a fresh new look for 2007, while preserving the 2006 look we had to completely shift the site around (note to self: dynamic URLs ALWAYS in future) and revising quite a bit of design.

So far we’ve included translations, mybloglogs, popularity rankings, social tools and a whole heap of stuff in the back end too.

Once I figure out how to blinkin’ well do tags & clouds from pages (UTW worked, then didn’t , now doesn’t) it’ll also have one of them – and we’re going to be continuously improving the site as we go along this year too.

But perhaps more importantl, Edition 13 (the first of 2007) is a belter with great articles from danah boyd, Geetha Narayanan and even a lively chart about the future of PLEs that includes yours truly.

As they say, enjoy.

I know K-12 blogs hosted at learnerblogs.org have been too slow of late – we’ve had a few complaints and I was beginning to be aware of a kinda ‘Edublogs – good for teachers, rubbish for students’ mentality that was bubbling away.

Well, as of now that’s no longer the case, from the Edublogs news blog:

This week we’ve been mostly working on getting our K-12 Edublogs site, hosted at http://learnerblogs.org up and running on the same database structure as our teacher version – which you’re enjoying now!

And so far so good, we know that sites hosted at learnerblogs.org have been unacceptably slow of late- partly do to a huge surge in popularity and partly to us focusing a bit too much on edublogs.org – but from now on that should be a thing of the past.

And just for fun we’ve also introduced another layer of comment spam protection – so now you school students can blog quickly and even more safely too.

Go spread the word!

Cam is of the belief that if I post about going to MODM2 in June, more people will come.

However, I have to say that I’m highly dubious as to whether this will make any difference at all, but what the heck eh.

Am going to be putting up a redesign in a few weeks time, so thought for the meantime I’d go old skool incorporated subversion, man.

Will be running through this and some of my other less exciting designs as we go.

Incidentally I can’t for the life of me seem to be able to find a Vanila Radio Userland theme in WordPress format… does anyone have the code hanging around so I can see if I can quickly port it in.

If you’ve got time for one in-depth, utterly fascinating and completely illuminating read this year, may I recommend Ulises Ali Mejias’ Networked Proximity (pdf 1.2MB).

The network as a map of interconnected elements or nodes has become a favored metaphor for describing a wide variety of social systems in our age. But the network is transitioning from being merely a way to describe social realities to serving as a model for organizing them… [from here]

A bloody impressive achievement.

I’ll be a little incommunicado over the next few days as am having all 4 (yes, that’s four) of my Wisdom teeth pulled, oucha.

Having said that, my Nan had the whole set tugged out in her twenties – prevention being better than a cure and all that – so I’m feeling kinda lucky in some ways.

See you on the other side.

OK then, I’m in the market for a new laptop. And yep, as I’m an uber-non-cool Windows user it’s all decisions decisions…

It’s going to live on a desk most of the time, need a decent display (bigger the better really) and doesn’t need to have any souped up game specs.

But I’d still like it to be, y’know, kinda powerful, decent HD, all the trimmings etc.

Only limitation is that it can’t be a Dell (configuring a Dell has to be the most painful thing I’ve ever gone through).

Any suggestions?

I’m now officially into my thirties, eeek.

Not to worry though, this is going to be the best year yet… I can feel it!

The father of WPMU – and by definition Edublogs, WordPress.com and many many other sites, has had another baby… and this time it’s a boy!

May you have no bugs to squash, no security holes to patch and no feature requests to field.

Huge congrats Donncha, wonderful news.