1st of February. Hurrah. Bandwidth issues quelled for another 20 odd days (Feb is good too, nice and short :)

Incidentally it seems that the best way to deal with the Googlebot battle I’ve been having was to contact Google (duh) who have been pretty responsive and nice saying they’re going to reduce the load… but we shall see!

Thanks for all the emails / inquiries about supporting edublogs.org. Keep ’em coming!

Stephen didn’t quite get it right when he said I was looking for donations. Basically ‘cos I’m not (and don’t think I said I was either?) … instead I’m looking for organisations / businesses to support the service. The reason being that I don’t want edublogs.org patrons to feel like they should be donating, because I feel that they should have the space for free with no obligation, and to be honest I’d also rather have a sustainable mini-business model to support it rather that other peoples generosity… more secure and I feel more comfortable with it.

But to ask how much is a fair comment. Currently I’m spending $US75 p/month on shared hosting and that’s at the absolute top end of what my provider offers in that area. Funny as I started on $7 not so long ago.

As a result of the (now pretty immense) daily backups, speed issues of running shared hosting, and the need for lots more space & bandwidth (especially when edublogs.org hands over enough space for podcasting etc!) we’re going to have to go onto a dedicated server. I’m also quite keen to stay with my original provider – they’re very honest, supportive and reliable. Seriously… so if you do wanna throw some $s my way without doing it yourself sign up with them and tell them I sent you! Psek.com

And that’s gonna cost US$250 p/month… shudder!

So, how much do I need? Well, US$3000 p/year basically. So if you’re an eccentric millionaire just drop it into paypal (james at incsub dot org) but otherwise I’d rather get it off organisations that can gain from the investment and have the funds to spare.

It’s pretty much at the end of each month… when the bandwidth limits are drawing near… that the only downside of running edublogs.org kicks in.

Essentially we’re going to need a dedicated server very very soon as in the first place we’re running out of bandwidth / space and in the second I figure we’ll all be happier with better performance (especially around backups). The problem is, however, that it costs. And when you’re sustaining yourself of a lecturers salary with a new mortgage, well, you know how it can be.

But I’m fundamentally against putting any advertising on blogs. Down the line I’d like to leave that option up to you (i.e. advertise if you want to & for yourself) but I certainly don’t want to slap ads on any edublogs.

So, it’s going to have to be sponsorship & partnership. Here’s the deal…

* Plain old simple advertising as a ’supporter’ on edublogs.org
* Inclusion (and write up) in the edublogs.org newsletter
* Inclusion in the ‘backend’ of each blog (this can be done in a number of ways)
* Partnership in offering edublogs.org users tools and services

And if you’d like or anyone can suggest other approaches / arrangements please leave a comment or contact me.

We can negotiate arrangements for 3, 6 & 12 months. If you’re interested or know anyone who might be interested please get in touch or let them know!

[Oh and for January so far we’re dealing in 32,665 uniques & 1,113,482 pages… and rapidly growing!!! Getting a 12 month agreement in now could be an enormous marketing bargain!!!]

Leigh responds to Stephen’s audio thoughts on spam and ‘control’ of content, saying that:

Stephen suggests that using free web based services leaves you open to spam and other sorded attacks on content, but I think hosting and managing your own software leaves you open.

Because:

Basically what I’m saying is that schools and other educational organisations by themselves, even their State departments, have a very limited capacity to keep up to date with effective content controls as well as running the systems they have in place. From my experience, having used their systems, and now the free web based ones, it seems to me the free web based ones offer a whole heap more peace of mind compared to getting, hosting and managing your own server and apps.

Which is of course of a great deal of interest to me not just because I’m fascinated by the whole ‘ownership’ issue (i.e. what is the impact of people having and edublogs.org account rather than their own .com for their blog, extend ad infinitum) but also because what Leigh’s hitting on is probably the number one question that I think a lot of vendors and educational establishments are asking themselves at the moment… to host & control their own systems or to use a third party.

Actually, I should qualify myself there a bit, It’s pretty simple at the bigger end of town (i.e. Universities, Departments)… partly because they’ve got the resources & know-how (ahem ;) to happily install, service and host their own. But for smaller institutions, schools, individual teachers… well, that’s a different kettle of fish. It’s *hard* to keep control over security issues, spam, uptime… to even understand where to start and how to get there without hiring someone specifically for the job.

Is this a long tail thing then? I’m certain that next generation of major online educational tools will arise out of use by individual teachers, schools and institutions but will these forever be (on the whole) beyond these groups and people to host themselves or will third party providers be the drivers here and will they be the next WebCTs etc. or will that only be achieved by large enterprise-install-yourself-systems?

It works for some things ;)

Why don’t I care about Flickr?
Because Flickr don’t care about me?
Why is it that I’d rather
Sample my pics through a feed?

Perhaps I’m just not that visual
Perhaps I’m not social enough
Perhaps it’s the same as with podcasts
I just don’t give much of a stuff!

I like some good ol annotation
Or maybe a good ‘un a day
Yeh it’s fun to get all those tags out
But I still feel compelled to say;

I really don’t care much for Flickr
I wouldn’t despair if it died
I’d still get plenty of pictures
I thought I liked it, but I lied.

A colleague at an Australian University showed me some details about where they’re going with Blackboard and blogs and oh dearie dearie me… it’s not a pretty place!

Specifically their “blog journal… [&] e-portfolio for teaching in the Autumn semester” is somewhat limited by the fact that:

“each blog will be subject bound (and it even has less functions than Blogger back in 2001) so at the end of the subject it all vanishes…..there’s no publicly published works – all secured behind the limits of students enrolled in that subject… [and more]”

Dontya just love the fact that they’re using a ‘blog journal’. I’m surprised they frickin didn’t call it a ‘blogg journal’ or my alltime favourite ‘BLOGG’ like it’s an acronym ;)

As my contact also points out the University in question is also somewhat seriously strapped for cash, and yet evidently has no problem heaping it out for these tools rather than taking the lead of many other excellent institutions and using open source tools.

And no, it’s not my place… As it happens some pretty exciting things are happening here in the OS social software sense… hope to be able to write more on that soon, it’s surprising where perseverance + time can sometimes get you!!!

Update: I forgot to mention that Andy Tsintas (also known as Andrew Tsintas, MFT etc.) deserves to be recognised for much much more than simply cleaning a river as a cub scout. I mean, the man is a legend of the street, an urban warrior and a mean motherf***er to boot!

Well last week was great, for many reasons, and quite wonderfully they have nothing at all to do with why this week is possibly even better, cos yesterday we found out that we’d managed to get this beautiful beautiful mud brick / timber / surrounded by gum trees house that’s about 1k from my step-daughter’s primary school and only 15k from the CBD. Check it out :)

Just don’t ask me to do anything too demanding today… the sparkling Aussie was flowing just a bit freely last night!

Robert asks whether PR students should blog and I think it’s a good question! In particular he’s after thoughts from anyone on the following:

(a) if you believe college PR students reading and blogging about PR practices is a viable and valuable endeavour,
(b) what are the key concepts/lessons that should be included in such an exercise,
(c) how will a future employer react to a student’s PR blogging efforts,
(d) what tactics by the students will best exhibit PR knowledge through their blogging efforts, and

My quick thoughts are:

(a) if you believe college PR students reading and blogging about PR practices is a viable and valuable endeavour

Not only is it a good learning exercise but the next gen PR person can’t afford *not* to be well acquainted with the media. If they’re not then they produce disasters like this.

(b) what are the key concepts/lessons that should be included in such an exercise

Well, I’m all for experiential learning so I reckon it;s about how they can engage with, influence and spread ‘the word’ (or any word) in a virtual sense. A bit like SEO101 meets activism101. Or am I being too cynical there? I guess getting people up to speed with writing well and often is probably a worthwhile goal.

(c) how will a future employer react to a student’s PR blogging efforts

Depends on whether they’ve got any nouse around them. At the moment, it might even hinder you… in 5 years, it’ll be the first question at interview.

(d) what tactics by the students will best exhibit PR knowledge through their blogging efforts

Effective use… measure it in links :D

This is definitely something that I reckon Darren Rowse would be better at answering than me!

You’ll have to get your Blog Hui Abstracts in in the next week or so, please do… it’s gonna be a corker of an event I reckon, just small enough for some really good conversations and just large enough for a real breadth of experience.

Here’s my abstract, building on recent Blogsavvy publications:

Multi-User Blogging in Organisational Contexts: How, Why and Wherefore?

The development of blogs can be traced as far back as 1994 and the creation of the term weblog to 1997. However, while for pioneers of ‘logging the web’ the process of hand-coding pages with regular updates was of little consequence, for the majority this was and remains to be a difficult and tiresome experience. Consequently, it was not until the development of hosted and streamlined blogging tools that that the popularity of blogging became more widespread. In the present day this popularity has led blogging to become in many (often informal) organisational respects a key educational, professional development and communicative activity and resource.

However, in an organisational context the generic hosted blogging services offered by ‘blog providers’ such as Blogger, Live Journal, WordPress.com and Typepad do not meet key requirements. Universities want ultimate control over the content that might be published on student (and staff) sites, businesses want commercially-in-confidence information to be blogged securely on the intranet and most corporate and institutional users want greater degrees of customisability, control and flexibility than these services are able to offer. In this context there has been a surge in the development of open source and for-profit multi-user blogging tools which allow organisations to provide, develop and control the use of blogs as a business exercise.

This paper examines the development of these tools from a technical and practical perspective. It asks which elements of these tools have developed in importance over time, which have ceased to be used and which have been added. It explores current and future possible applications of these tools in light of existing and developing functionality and asks what the future holds for the uses of organisational and institutional blogs and blogging as a whole in education, communication and business.

Here’s a linear remix of the slides from yesterday, everyone likes a 1,2,3 don’t they?

Am happy to share Fireworks .pngs of all of these if people want higher definition versions to play with.