Just to prove I’m definitely not a journalist I also do interviews :)

Here are a couple, one a few days old and one just today (and in Spanish… my mum would be proud!)

Here’s the first one by David Tosh at Edufilter.

And here’s the second at La Clase Abierta.

Thanks for giving a shit guys!

Alrighty then, here’s a big ‘un to mark the first week of the new blog :)

Today’s Citizen article is a homage to the humble online news/ent/info site’s blog… but not for the reasons you might expect.

There’s an interesting distinction between blogs based around opinion, news, ‘your say’ style articles and feature pieces… anyway, have a peek and lemme know what you think.

Well, it’s not everyday you get a new blog, and certainly not everyday you get to run it on the biggest news and information site in your State, so I figured I may as well crow about it a bit and invite you over for a peek.

Basically it’s me making baby gazelle steps into writing about new media in the context of my job at theage.com.au. The name is a play all sorts of things, I’ll get to that later, but you should expect some critical and overly opinionated commentary on blogs, citizen media, online news sites and more.

If you’re of that persuasion you can grab the feed here.

Today’s post is all about how comments are way too overrated in big news sites – especially as they are currently done.

Go weigh in :)

Am running upgrades on edublogs.org over the next 24 hours so please excuse any bugs in that period… the improvements are going to absolutely rock though!

Later: I had to roll back for a number of reasons, please check the forums for more details.

Bugger, missed the official date but still a happy belated first birthday to edublogs.org!

One of these days I’ll get round to writing some serious stuff about the site, how it’s been, where I’d like it to go and how it can get there. But for the moment here are some stats:

By the end of January (6 months) the site had served 38,534 unique browsers and 1,448,743 page impressions that month. By the end of July (12 months) we’d gone through a whopping 113,883 unique browsers and 3,607,871 page impressions.

In the same month learnerblogs.org, uniblogs.org and eslblogs.org went though over 50,000 unique browsers.

OK, it isn’t quite myspace but it’s pretty cool :)

As for blogs on May 23rd the 10,000th edublogs.org blog was created. Which was great. But as of this moment today (August 14th) there are 17,869 blogs. Yikes.

Yes there are definitely some splogs (although I catch 99% of them I reckon) and yes a high percentage aren’t updated that regularly, and yes some of them are students blogs (annoying – I need to highlight learnerblogs.org and uniblogs.org better) but all the same… there is a *lot* of great stuff happening in there and you can subscribe to the RSS feed for the entire site to see the rate (and the great stuff) that’s coming out.

So, the good news is that I that to keep all of this going smoothly I just bought another huge server to support the site (not cheap!!!) and that it’s going well… the average news is that it needs an upgrade, a redesign and some cool new features, but the upside of that is that sooner rather than later it’s going to get Flickr, YouTube,and widget integration.

More thoughts on futures and implications later, meanwhile…

This is something I haven’t done before – listened to myself giving a presentation – it’s kinda scary.

Lots of ‘ums’ and ‘uhs’ to start with, which decrease a little over time, but I reckon I could do with a few public speaking classes nonetheless :)

An absolutely great seminar / conference – fascinating attendees and a great organisation. Couldn’t have enjoyed it more.

Here’s My powerpoint (3.11 MB). You can find some very dodgy quotes and some of my early scratchings about what I was going to say in the notes for each slide.

Am seriously looking forward to attending this seminar in August…

Can’t believe I’m on the same bill as Philip Adams, like, wow :)

Edublogs.org 10,000th blog winner Mark O’Meara has invested his winnings in lastmadpuppy.com as a discussion space which is ‘a bit like a book club but for movies and music as well’. Congrats again Mark and best of luck with the new endeavour!

Have discovered a little more about recent server issues… it seems that Bloglines, when allowed access to my server, is making ~230 parallel requests/second to it… which is naturally, along with all the other requests, killing everything.

Problem is that a very significant percentage of people hosted on the server – edublogs.org users included – are heavily bloglines dependant (as am I).

I’ve contacted them and emailed them but with no joy and as such have to ban them for the moment… but it’d really make my day if a Bloglines engineer could come along and figure how we could fix things up (bearing in mind I’m going to sleep now). Dunno if they’ve ramped up their crawler but it needs sorting soon.