Ulises posts a fascinating follow up to his Distributed Textual Discourse paper: Facilitating the social annotation and commentary of web pages.

This post is all about what’s going on down in the area and, if you’re interested in Purple Text, Liquid Information, Anozilla, Wikalong, Good Notes, co-link or gibeo… then this is one you’ll want to read.

The question, of course, is whether we will annotate the web, or whether it will annotate itself, or will Google get to it first. Without enough consideration [disclaimer over] I’m of the feeling that we won’t. I can’t see a regressive reason for it, and if you don’t have a regressive reason then you don’t have a reason.

But I think that we will learn a lot about what the internet is through exploring if we can do this… which is equally valuable.

There are a few more posts in this, I can tell :O)

So… the idea was with the Blogtalk Blog to open it up as a kind of asynchronous backchannel / space for sharing stuff.

I figured, partly as a result of an excellent comment from Peter Bolger, that a blog would work well this way and that it would save the stress / issues that a backchannel usually has. Plus, given the medium, probably the best thing to do was to let questions & stuff come out asynchronously through it (there being plenty enough of them f2f at the conf).

Am not sure how much that has happened (questions) but there has been a lot of good sharing and commenting… hopefully there’ll be some good reflection too and it saves a heck of a lot of stress for organisers, in terms of shifting the uploading of presentations :o)

Next time I think I’ll do something similar… don’t reckon I’d run with a backchannel unless there were 200+ participants.

Any suggestions for improvement?

Lindon’s naming conventions might be a bit odd but I reckon the art kicks ass. Big white walls please.

Larger version & more.

This BDU paper will be of lots and lots of interest to people thinking about blogs in education: Reflections on reflection: Blogging in undergraduate design studios.

What the design guys at UQ have been doing is going fully bloggy… behind the firewall (don’t worry they’re coming out soon :o). Great results, fascinating stuff and I need to refer a lot of people to Ian MacColl.

Abstract:

In this paper we describe our experiences introducing weblogs as an online design journal into two design-based IT degrees. We introduced weblogs to support reflection by the students within a studio process. We view this introduction as successful and we have continued using blogs in the subsequent academic year, although we have made some changes to take account of problems with scale, sophistication and effort.

Here’s my Blogtalk Presentation with audio.

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Having got over the stress of the projector, am starting to realise how cool this is.

We’ve got at least 100 people here I reckon, beautiful venue, good weather and the wireless working.

It’s all good :D

Here’s a post reflecting on the visual design process that I went through with Blogsavvy.

Lots of stuff about using categories, about elements, related posts, and more!

A couple of other Blogsavvy posts that you might find of interest are:

Alternative Blogging Business Models : how you can effectively use blogs in your business communication structures

&

IM, wikis and blogs for your business communication : my thoughts on effective ways of using these tools (and an interesting discussion on the value (or not) of wikis

Enjoy!

Drumroll please… I’d like to introduce a new blog… my new blog to be precise!

Blogsavvy is part a creature of me wanting to write about blogging a lot more, part result of my belief that blogs are here to stay and are capable of making an enormous positive difference in a range of spheres and part me thinking that this might be what I really want to do!

It’s going to be a blog about blogging, about blogging for Education, Business, Communities, a Cause and even for Money.

The business model goes like this… if you’re interested in what I’m writing about and think I know what I’m doing then you can hire me to do blog workshops, assist with developing your blog strategy, come up with and implement blog solutions and even do you some savvy blog design.

incorporated subversion remains by blog, IncSub will remain (and hopefully grow through this) the focus for online education and organisational learning and the free-for-teachers model is never going to end there. But I really really dig blogging, I’ve enjoyed putting Blogtalk Downunder together like you wouldn’t believe and I rather want to do this professionally… perhaps even full time down the road!

And if you could give me a leg up and share a link to the site through your blog, then you’ll be giving me a great start and I’ll love you forever (again :o)

Alrighty then.

I’d like to set up a public ‘Blogtalk Backchannel’ (i.e. chat room) for people to use during the conference to discuss / ask questions / be all subversive while people are presenting.

People who aren’t attending might also find it interesting as all the papers are up and available for anyone in their completeness!

First up… do you reckon this is a good idea or will the presenters hate me for it?

Secondly… if it is a good idea does anyone have any recommended solutions?

Will happily accept a ‘donated’ environment for the conference (and obviously highlight whoever has donated it) and am equally happy to install php/mysql or other alternatives… the one thing I don’t want is ads.

As WPMU comes more online and I’m working with more and more people using WordPress I’m acutely aware of Alex’s warning that “it’s only easy now because you are a geek” and so have decided to whack together, on demand, a few simple WordPress Tutorials.

So I’ve created a tutorials page and will also post them here as they come up, grab a feed if you wanna get updated.

Here’s the first Tutorial:

Tutorial 1 – How do you format your WordPress posts (bold, italics, blockquotes & links)?

[Update: If you’d like to see any more tutorials on particular topics drop me a note in the comments below and I’ll see what I can fling together for ya!]