One of the things I’ve got a great deal of pleasure and a fair bit of experience from over the last few months has been helping the rather good Australian Flexible Learning Magazine, ‘The Knowledge Tree‘ move into the land of blogs.

Yep, I certainly am no graphic designer but I hope we’ve done a pretty good job using WordPress (natch :) to provide RSS feeds, commentable (and non-commentable) articles, different visually themed editions, email subscription techniques and the obligatory contact form too!

And what’s more you can catch me talking about the development here in their new current edition, Going Social. Alternatively there’s The Knowledge Tree Goes Social by Joanne Jacobs, Surveying online technology – a matter of design by Ian Robertson, the very comprehensive Mlearning: A future of learning by Marcus Ragus (with accompanying interesting book review) and last but not least an interview with Margaret Robson entitled Finding Your Voice Online.

So, why don’t you spin over to their homepage or latest edition, enjoy the articles, leave some comments, ask some questions and tell me how we can improve it. Don’t think I’ll be bagging journal publishers just so much in the future!

Starting at The Age tomorrow, can’t wait!

• Publishing 2.0 » The Democratic Web Has Always Been An Illusion
  "The element of the net neutrality argument that I’ve always found specious is that the ISPs have no “right” to tier the internet and shut out the little guy… Of course they have the right — they own the “pipes”!"

• How many news outlet staff actually read their own RSS feeds?. Strange Attractor: Picking out patterns from the chaos that is the blogosphere.
  On the challenges of RSS to news agencies. Personally I don’t reckon it’s that big a deal (esp. if you’ve only got limited feeds) but it is an interesting question in terms of quality and process.
• Bitty Browser Home Page — Picture-in-Picture for the Web
  Great to test mobile compatibility without a mobile device.
• Comment is free: Free to offend?
  "How free should you be to offend others, and is freedom of expression a right above all others? That was the subject at last night’s Guardian debate at the Hay festival." – Visit link for mp3!
• News and jobs for journalists :: Comment is popular for newspaper's blog portal
  Comment is free reflections…. one of the things I love about the project is Georgina Henry’s willingness to discuss progress and the experience. Invaluable.

Had an interesting last couple of days at Deakin as a presenter; first up on a panel of editors (still makes me feel a little odd) for a new media & PR student conference and then as a part of a finale (of sorts) where my suggestions that most Australian Universities are very out of touch with how people really communicate and collaborate online were met with the usual ambivalence.

What really stuck (and is still irritating me now) though was surprising in that it has little to do with the day-to-day frustrations of ed tech in Unis and came, in fact, from the editor of a very respected Victorian regional paper. He responded (that isn’t much of a hint seeing as it’s almost always ‘him’) when asked approximately ‘What would new graduates best bring to the table to get a position with you?’ that the only thing that you certainly shouldn’t be bringing is a ‘BLOGG’… he wanted to see clippings, and plenty of them, and shorthand too, and the ability to write a good item etc. etc. but not a ‘BLOGG’, heck no.

And this got me to wondering why… has he received applications from cat-bloggers? Has he spent many a long hour turfing through inane personal post after inane personal post? I’m confused… to me having an, ahem, blog, is much like writing a book or publishing a magazine, or, come to think of it, chatting with your mates… it’s exactly what you happen to make it. Pen & Paper. No?

So perhaps, the advice I should’ve given is when approaching someone who concludes that everything that can’t be ‘clipped’ ‘aint worthwhile that the very last thing you should be doing is mentioning the word ‘blog’. In fact you should be pointing to your credentials in the online-collaborative-professional-publication-sphere engagement with the multimedia-enhanced-web2point0h-social-user-generated-content-sector. Or something like that.

You’re gonna love this:

• News of Wikipedia's Death Greatly Exaggerated. Many-to-Many:
  "A huge number of our current systems are hanging in the balance, because the more valuable a system, the greater the incentive for free-riding. Our largest and most spontaneous sources of conversation and collaboration are busily being retrofit with filters and logins and distributed ID systems, in an attempt to save some of what is good about openess while defending against Wiki spam, email spam, comment spam, splogs, and other attempts at free-riding. Wikipedia falls into that category."
• News and jobs for journalists :: Murdoch moves to further boost online communities
  "The drive, which is in an early stage, will see the addition of an online community editor, who will create new forums on hot topics and will seed user-generated content from readers, as well as other staff in editorial and management." Is it me or is this just plain freaky…
• Technorati, AP partner – CyberJournalist.net – Technorati, AP partner
  Interesting alignment

• Publishing 2.0 » Consumers Are the New Medium
  "P&G, one of the largest advertisers, is pioneering a 2.0 approach to marketing that has little need for paid media advertising and leverages good old-fashioned face-to-face social networks"
• Publishing 2.0 » MySpace Hallucinations
  "So great is the hype surrounding MySpace that people are starting to hallucinate, seeing operating income where there are only registered users and page views."
• News and jobs for journalists :: 'Big Blogger' to pick next Guardian columnist
  "Guardian Unlimited’s Comment Is Free site has launched a Big Brother-style competition to hire its latest correspondent."
• Telegraph Blogs: Upload: May 2006: Lessons in blogging (1)
  Telegraph blogging style guide…. for telegraph writers getting into blogging.
• Google News Cloud
  Newsclouds / Tagclouds… haven’t given much thought to this, wonder how it’d go down in non-tech circles.
• The Times' free download draws thousands – Editors Weblog
  "The London Times is packaging a free download of Michael Gill’s 1964 short film ¨The Peaches¨ with its online Cannes Film Festival coverage" Interesting… wonder if ACMI might be interested…

As always, these things come in threes, so to complement turning 30 and moving into the new house, I’m also moving jobs… and professional fields too!!!

And I couldn’t be more excited about it if I tried. I’m going to be working as the Online Community Editor at The Age which is not just a fantastic paper but also the one I’ve been reading ever since I touched down in Aus. Add to that the fact that theage.com.au is the largest news and information site in Victoria and is already embracing user-interactivity, blogs and more… and I reckon that this is about the best opportunity going in online communications in Melbourne.

If you’re a user of edublogs.org, learnerblogs.org, uniblogs.org or eslblogs.org don’t stress as I’m going to be continuing to run them – all be it at a slightly reduced (read: evening) capacity. I also have hopes of partnering with some people experienced enough in php / Mysql and WP / WPMU to take the site to the next level regardless… so no worries :) If you’re hosted on my server also don’t worry, am not going to be pulling any plugs at all so as long as this is live so will you be (and in my book that’s permanent). What I will be stopping is any new consulting or contracts running through incsub but I’m always happy to recommend other providers.

As for online education, well, it’s a bit of a big step for me as I’ve been involved as either a practitioner, manager or researcher (and provider?) for the last 7 years so to step away from this area feels like a bit of a leap. However, (and this is another wonder of these sorts of communities) it’s not like I’m going to lose contact or engagement with the area or that I’m gonna lose touch with any of the amazing people I’ve talked to and read for the last 3-4 years… so it’s kinda a safe leap, if you know what I mean.

And as for incorporated subversion, well, I reckon it’s just as applicable in media as it is in education, so don’t expect any changes there either… after all, it’s all about communication.

So, sometime just before my very busy weekend the 10,000th edublogs was created! Interestingly enough it’s been called 1984 (nothing untoward there I hope) and I’d be delighted if you could join me in welcoming it to the edublogosphere!

Hurroo!

But at what time you ask… well, it was created at 7.20 AM on 19th May 2006… waaay before most guesses (scary acceleration of use going on here) but not to far wrong for Mr O’Mara who guessed the closest at 4.32PM on the 19th and is the winner of a free domain and hosting for a year :)

There were some other pretty close guesses from Forest Park and the WALT project but Mr O’Mara took it by a slender margin:

My guess is part maths and a big part guess work.

Anyhow I guess the point, aside from my greed, is that you will probably we seeing more blogs like this in the future and hopefully that’s a good thing all around.

And Simon you got disqualified for a. posting a guess a good hour and a bit after I’d closed entries, b. being ‘in the know’ & c. already having plenty of free domains and hosting :)

One that begun on Friday with Optus closing out net connection early, included at least 8 round trips to the new pad, ‘ended’ with Optus setting up new cable yesterday evening (two teams, people up ladders / overhead lines / on roofs!) and now there’s only 500 odd emails to go :)

So please forgive me if I’ve been tardy in replying to you or difficult to get hold of, all shipshape and working order now!