Cool, I’m going to be at Online Social Networks 2005, first time I’ve attended a ‘summit’ ;o) Will be interesting to see what comes up, at $35 it’s a snip and kicks off today if anyone fancies coming along…

Via Sharon comes Blogbib, an excellent resource describing itself as an “annotated Bibliography on Weblogs and Blogging, with a Focus on Library/Librarian Blogs…”.

For example here’s a great descriptive list of books on blogging and here are plenty of online presentations on blogging. Susan Herzog is obviously another of these amazing librarians previously trapped in those big buildings… who’ve been let out by the blog!

Simon Pockley of The Flight of Ducks (an amazing, poetic web experience if you have a few minutes to explore!) and also a colleague told me a fascinating story this morning about alternative approaches to handling information.

Essentially he and others were talking at a recent metadata conference in Seattle about libraries and the way they organise information and a Nicaraguan librarian shared her experience of dealing with a posthumous bequeath of an individuals entire personal library.

Now in Australia (and probably any European or N American library I’m guessing), what would happen would be that the books would be checked against existing stock, examined as to their condition, classified under the Dewey system and then placed / archived / sold on accordingly.

Not in Nicaragua!

Instead the library set apart an area / constructed a separate wing for the personal library and organised it exactly as it had been in the deceased home. This way they could study their indexing and organization, readers could experience the library as it was set out by the individual / family and a coherent collection of books was kept together as a coherent whole.

I’m not entirely sure what this means but, for me, it really resonates and gets the cogs going when thinking about these discussions over tagging, organisation and the ‘centred’ (as opposed to ‘centralised’) development and management of information through weblogs / CMSs. Very interesting.

I love having a weblog, Mike Gurstein editor-in-chief of The Journal of Community Informatics commented on my last post saying that it was a mistake that the email got sent out and that all the papers are now fully available. Frabjous :D

So not only am, I now back on their email notification list (c’mon guys, you’re almost there… get yourself some RSS feeds, you know you want to!) but also have access to a plethora of interesting papers examining community and sustainability including:

Community Portals – The UK Experience. A False Dawn Over the Field of Dreams? by Stephen James Musgrave:

“Research has been undertaken to investigate the extent to which locally deployed UK community portals are capable of supporting interactive citizen services with local government departments. The study finds that few existing portals enable on-line access to back office systems to enable self-service interactivity for citizens, but along with problems in joining-up technology there are also problems with joining-up people. Current activities are analogous with a “False Dawn” in community portal development, due to gaps and current inadequacies of portal capability”

[I think it’s pretty simple really: ‘portals’ ‘don’t’ ‘work’ – well not as they are currently seen to work. However, if a portal operates as essentially a facilitative tool for the development of communication centred around individuals as parts of communities (i.e. end to end not in the middle) then we’re not all lost yet]

Emotion, Gender and the Sustainability of Communities by Kerry Jeanne Tanner

“Utilising examples from the author’s case study research in a women’s community organisation in Melbourne, Australia, it contrasts the barren emotional landscape of many organisations with the vibrance and warmth of a feminist community organisation, and considers how ICTs may either facilitate or constrain this emotional expression.”

[Fascinating stuff reminds me of Don Norman’s observation in Emotional Design that SMS & IM are not ‘content’ or ‘information’ tools on the whole. They connect us emotionally, let us know that each other are there and that we can reach out and touch base with them. Far more powerful than any KM or ‘productivity’ geared ICTs in developing an effective and happy organization I reckon]

Prompted by a couple of emails regarding the kind of levels of support that IncSub (do you like the final double barrelled capitalisation?) can provide and the answer generally being “Um, a bit, but we, um, aren’t a hosting company or anything” I was wondering whether there would be any point providing a kind of ‘premium’ service. Keeping, of course, the free incsub.org/yoursite areas for CMSs, wikis, blogs etc. but offering a bit more.

I figured something like:

-Domain name, 200MB space, 3Gig bandwidth, unlimited SQLdbases, tech support and all the other fancy stuff (control panel, auto installers etc. etc.)

Plus

-Design support, consultation, IncSub Association Membership (a bit like a professional society, we could even have an IncSub online conference / journal :o)

For, say, $20 a month or $200 for a year… does that sound utterly unlikely or impossible?

Prompted by a bit of etymological exploration from Anjo (being an ex ESL teacher these things always get me) I figured I’d use A9 to support my contention that all this stuff about the name Google coming from a googol is a bit far fetched really.

You see the real source for the name is Enid Blyton, in particular from The Magic Faraway Tree series where Silky and Moon Face are forever serving up google buns, pop cakes and toffee shocks. I know this because I’ve been reading them to our two beautiful girls over the last year and can prove it (a bit) by this reference (you might need to have an Amazon login?) in The Beautiful Cricket Ball and the Little Toy Store (obviously A9 haven’t got found to Joe, Beth & Frannie’s adventures quite yet.)

Indeed, you’ve gotta wonder if the name doesn’t come from Blyton full stop, she was certainly writing in the 1930s and Wikipedia describes the coining of the term as follows:

“The term was coined in 1938 by nine-year-old Milton Sirotta, nephew of American mathematician Edward Kasner.”

Who knows, is he still around?

Final post for the week… I’ve just got my Australian Citizenship through! Yay :D After almost 5 years to the day from landing in Melbourne and it’s been a heck of a journey!!! In honour of the occasion here’s the unofficial Australian national anthem (sung as no-one knows the words to the official one)

From the Age:

“On April 19, 1984, after at least a hundred years of unproductive debate, the Governor General, Sir Ninian Stephen, declared Advance Australia Fair to be the Australian national anthem.

The song was first performed on St Andrew’s Day in 1878. It was written by a Scot, Peter Dodds McCormick, who wrote under the name “Amicus”.

The (misheard) lyrics of Advance Australia Fair are:

Australians all own ostriches
Four minus one is three.
With olden royals, we’re fair and loyal,
Our home is dirt by sea.
I learned to bounce on nature strips
In booties stitched with care.
In mystery’s haze, let’s harvest maize
And plant azaleas there.
Enjoy full trains and let us in
And dance Australia yeah!
(Anon.)”

[real lyrics here and .mp3 (apologies for the source)]

Thought I’d repost the Blogtalk ‘call for sponsorship’ post here in it’s entirety. We’re an attractive proposition and a worthy non-profit cause so please pass this on to your marketing / business development folk, it’ll be good blog karma if you do!

“OK, now we’ve got a great venue, great invited speakers and great abstracts… it’s time to ask for interests in sponsorship.

Consider this:

-We’ll be releasing all of the papers progressively up to the conference beginning through this site (huge link / blogging potential)

-We’ll be getting serious press from all the major Australian newspapers and several well respected international online publishers

-This site will remain online for the foreseeable future (we’ll probably use a new domain for the next one so that’s potentially for ever)

-We’ll be attended by major players in business and academia from Australia and beyond

-We’re hopefully going to announce shortly some amazing presenters / panellists that’ll create a heck of a buzz

We’re interested in all kinds of sponsorship from ‘limited’ ads on the site to sponsored posts to co-sponsoring the laptop satchels for attendees and the conference dinner. We can look into media/press arrangements too. We’ve priced the conference pretty much as low as we can so every little helps, if you’re in a University think of it as supporting research and innovation (it’s also entirely non-profit!)

All inquiries to me please, james [at] incsub [dot] org

[Might take me until Tuesday 7th to get back to you]”

Just reread Steve Krause’s When Blogging Goes Bad: A Cautionary Tale About Blogs, Emailing Lists, Discussion, and Interaction and two things sprung to mind.

Firstly this is absolutely critical reading for anyone considering blogging in teaching and learning, it’s a really good examination of blogs not working and that, in my book, is as valuable as 10 papers on why blogging is great. I’d put this on any reading list.

Secondly, Steven’s conclusion that essentially email listservs are a far more effective place for discussion is pretty accurate but what he doesn’t seem to go into is exactly why this is. I’d argue that this is basically down to the fact that email comes simply and ubiquitously to each person whereas the blogs in Steven’s case were very much places that people had to visit, multiple places at that which makes them even less conducive to discussion than typical discussion boards.

Blogs can be like email too though (and much more effective in many ways) through aggregation and I think that had, for example, a combination of the public aggregator facility in Drupal been used alongside individual aggregators like Bloglines then things might have turned out very differently.

Of course, people might not have used them (aggregators are hardly ubiquitous) but had they been used, even in very small numbers, I think that the results of his experiment might have been quite different. Blogging without aggregation is pointless (and I might also say that aggregation without blogging is equally lost…)

This is a pretty cool edublog that I just stumbled upon, “Edugadget – plain-talking technology reviews for teachers‘”. Lots of stuff on audioblogging, Skype, Wikipedia etc. which while it ‘aint that new to me would be v. popular with most of the teachers I know, worth a look, here’s the feed (although why a WordPress blog would use Feedburner is beyond me???).

Oh, and it’s ‘new and already improved’, heh :o)