Category: Blogging

Blogging 101 at Northern Voice 2008

Northern Voice has started with the Unconference today. I will be doing a lot of liveblogging along the way using Windows Live.

I decided to attend Blogging 101, the first of the sessions in Internet Bootcamp. Richard Eriksson of Raincity Studios presented. I decided that I wanted to see the approach that this stream is taking as I will be speaking about Liveblogging 101 later today at 2:00 pm.

Richard just made an interesting comment about adding blog comments. He mentioned that he adds his own comments to his own blog to help make his blog more conversational as well as to add more information

Somebody added a comment about writing about your blog’s purpose, whatever that purpose may be.

Richard then spoke about RSS feeds, and I shared a comment about subscribing to RSS feeds for academic journals. There are a number of academic journals I read (or at least want to see the content that is being published), and I subscribe to them using FeedDemon (which I have used for years, constantly gets better each year, and is now free!).

Richard is giving a good introductory session right now. He made good use of PowerPoint slides, following some of the best practices of having no more than six words per slide. While there are many reasons to use PowerPoint, for a presentation like this the few words per slide is really valuable.

Richard was discussing Event blogging and Liveblogging. He discussed how liveblogging can involve adding date stamps each time a post is updated. I think that may be useful if using a service such as Cover It Live, but that system (with great bells and whistles) is still a little bulky to use.

Twitter is a great microblogging platform, using only 140 characters. I Tweet at http://twitter.com/JeffreyKeefer. Sketchblogging is a concept I am not very familiar with, but it reminds me of Hugh’s work.

Tumbleblogging is something I am not very familiar with, so will have to look into this a bit more later. Mental note to myself.

Now that the time for this is running out, I see that lots of people still seem to have lots of questions. Good to leave a session with continued interest still there.

The Tiki Room at Northern Voice 2008

The official opening of Northern Voice 2008 took place this evening at the Tiki Room, in the Waldorf Hotel in Vancouver. Good food, good friends, and some wonderful new colleagues made for a wonderful evening. I expect to have a lot of more specific blogging, as well as a health share of liveblogging (come see my presentation on Friday!), over the next few days.

I uploaded the pictures I took to Flickr for all to enjoy and share.

Northern Voice 2008

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A Useful New Tagging Book

As I me mentioned in one of my recent posts, I just read Gene Smith’s book: Tagging: People-Powered Metadata for the Social Web. Great overview of tagging for both practice as well as some more detailed professional work. Lots of good stuff in the book, including a discussion about tags (of course), taxonomies, folksonomies, metadata, controlled vocabulary, and countless examples to illustrate his work. Speaking at times in the voice of a teacher and at other times as a software developer, I feel I have a better understanding of tag clouds and how useful these features can be from a personal as well as social media perspective. In the process of reading this, I decided to begin using the tagging feature built-into WordPress, as now I think in the long-term this will be useful for me as well as my colleagues. Score one for Gene’s persuasion.

One of the topics Gene mentioned involved using capital letters, abbreviations, and underscores / hyphens. His suggestion that the decision about how to handle this issue should be addressed at the beginning. I thought this was good advice, but for my own use I wish he would have suggested what he recommends in this case (in the teacher voice, not the developer voice). taggingI understand the differences between various formats, such as: New York, new york, NY, ny, New_York, new-york, etc., but I am not sure which option(s) I should use. I could have used some end-user guidance here as opposed to be left to discern all my options. In this case, I find myself being inconsistent in how I tag my own blog posts and Flickr images, as I tend to second-guess how others may search for and use the tags.

This is one of the questions I will ask him when I listen to his presentation at Northern Voice next week. I just learned that Gene will be presenting at Internet Bootcamp as well, so it will be nice to meet him so close to my finishing his book.

I think this book will do well, as I can only imagine tagging options and needs to increase in the future. As much as consistent tags seem like a good idea, I often find myself thinking about terms and usage in different ways from other people. No wonder I am a qualitative researcher!

Northern Voice Facts

Northern Voice 2008Thank you, Darren Barefoot, for creating a one-pager of specifications and historical information about Northern Voice 2008.  

Darren is one of the architects who brought Northern Voice into existence several years ago, and has managed to get me to plan traveling back there, for a second time, all the way from New York.

While billed as Canada’s personal blogging and social media conference, this is a friendly and very informative (in a pleasant networking) environment, where I will be presenting some work on Liveblogging in the conference’s first ever Internet Bootcamp.  

I can’t believe the conference is next week; I am sure in two weeks from now I will be bursting with ideas and next steps and suggestions and resources and new contacts / colleagues / friends. If only all conferences I attend could net so much.

Twitter Admits Reliability Is Valuable?

Did I read the last two posts on the Twitter blog correctly?

They stated “You may have noticed we had an outage last night/stretching into this morning,” but instead they should have admitted that their service in the past few days has been intermittent at best.

On the heels of this, they then began today’s post with “We have a stated goal to make Twitter a reliable global communication utility. ” Really? Are they serious?

They have to know their service glitches have been lampooned in the blogosphere, and their credibility has seriously eroded as being a reliable (aka business-able) communication and microblogging (liveblogging?) tool. Many of us have started to rely on Twitter as a communication tool (via Web, BlackBerry, a whole host of applications, etc.), using it from everything from liveblogging to self-marketing and branding.

I know whenever I tell colleagues and friends about Twitter, the platform sounds so silly until I show people how it works and how I use it. Now, I really love Twitter. I like how my Tweets get archived daily on my own blog. How I am able to join a new organization and suddenly begin to have other people interested in reading my daily Twitter musings.

I really hope Twitter becomes more reliable. While this all this costs money, is there enough financing coming in to create and maintain the very reliability we all expect?