Canal cruise July 7, 2006
Posted by Andy Roberts in : video , 3comments
The emergency service on the Lancaster canal waterbus finished last weekend, with the reopening of the Lune Aquaduct, but on Saturday we had the 72ft traditional packet boat all to ourselves for the whole day.
It was quiet, beautiful and the narrowboat created a slight breeze on that very hot day. Amongst other things, we saw two or three Marsh Harriers, which I’m told are quite rare in the Northwest.
The above video clip is an embedded Flash version, as requested but you may also download a high quality quicktime movie (15Mb) or a smaller one (7Mb)
Marsh Harrier photo by Andy Roberts
Technorati Tags: waterways, Lancaster, canal, waterbus, video, “Marsh, Harrier”, Lune, Aquaduct
The Blog as dynamic user profile July 6, 2006
Posted by Andy Roberts in : blogs and community , comments closedOne of the established methods of facilitating online communities is to have some kind of user profile or identity tool, to help set the context by giving some background behind the names in the discussion. Often with a mugshot as well.
But when you are a member of multiple communities, creating and updating a profile in each space can seem like a wasteful duplication of effort, leading to out of date, terse or missing profiles.
This is one of the ways in which blogs and communities can work well together because if you are a blogger, then all you need to put in your various profiles is a link to the blog and that will probably serve as a richer, more informal and current type of introduction. If a new member joins a network I’m involved with, I’m quite likely to subscribe to their blog for a while whereas if they only have a static homepage or profile, then after the first glance it may never get checked out again. So my suggestion here is that blogs can help new members to integrate themselves into communities more quickly, and that would be a net benefit to both.
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Control in blogs and communities (and flickr) July 5, 2006
Posted by Andy Roberts in : blogs and community, COP, tools , add a commentJoistke adds some important points in the blogging and communities discussion:
I think blogs simply add a lot of potential to thought development within a community of practice. Eg. if you did not have a blog, I wouldn’t have a clue what you were busy with or thinking about! Forums may seem more controllable, but they are not.
Yes, blogs are person-centric and this is what makes them very different to forums. Some people use their blogs as a space for personal reflection and working through half formed ideas, in a way which perhaps wouldn’t be afforded in a community forum. On the other hand, I like to surface my own ideas more through dialogue. As such, the contribution of both forms of communication is becoming clearer.
The issue of control is probably crucial when comparing technologies for communities. If a forum is heavy handedly owned or moderated, then some contributors will retreat to their blogs where they have total control over everything, even if the readership is less visible. Or it may be due to an inconvenient pace and volume of discussion on the list. Veering off at a slight tangent, here’s a quote from a discussion on Flickr about Groups vs Tags which reveals a little more about control:
Groups are useful - you can’t be sure people will use the same tags, or tags at all, if people join you know they are relatively interested, and they can have discussions. Also you can remove things from groups that shouldnt be there but you can’t remove incorrectly tagged stuff.
Strandbeest July 5, 2006
Posted by Andy Roberts in : General , 3commentsLast week I nipped in to Trafalgar Square to see the strandbeesten. These are large moving models created by artist Theo Jansen. I had an interesting discussion with him there about the role of darwinian evolution in the design and devlopment of the ‘beasts’ and then I was interviewed by a German film crew, which was in turn videod by Gordon Joly, the other clips in the following montage are by me.
movie: here is strandbeest.mov ( 4.8Mb)
The beesten are currently on exhibition at the Institute of Contemporairy Art at the Mall, and the artist is giving a performance lecture tonight at the ICA
many more stills available through Flickr tags - strandbeest, strandbeesten
Update: The lecture was sold out, no returns. drat.
The question of blogging and communities July 4, 2006
Posted by Andy Roberts in : blogs and community, tools , 1 comment so farIn response to my previous post, Frankie Roberto comments:
Surely, though, there is an argument that it’s harder to hold communities together when they are spread over a number of seperate weblogs than when they’re in a single hosted environment. RSS, trackback, CoComment and the like are all useful tools, but within a specialised online community, nothing can beat the immediecy and connected-ness of forums and similar.
I have no doubt about that either. There is also an argument that the simple text based interactions that took place asynchronously over dial-up or overnight connections lent themselves to a higher proportion of deeper, more thoughtful conversations. It sounds backward looking, and luddite but if something has been lost and that is recognised then it may also be recaptured in a higher form perhaps.
Developments in technology tend not to be driven by communty needs, but there’s no reason why they coudn’t be, in theory.
Of course, blogs and forums can work together. Sites like Livejournal, Warwick Blogs and to some extent MySpace all have personal blogs, but with a single sign-in that makes it easy to see replies to your comments and new postings, build friends lists and communicate much more immedietly.
That’s definitely the way things seem to be going, with enormously large, sticky and highly granulated constellations of online communities owned by just a few of the big media corporations. The old blogosphere is probably just a small backwater compared to these new, giant but isolated spaces. For example, did you know that Photobucket has over seven times the market share of Flickr? ( according to hitwise )
I think the answer to the question of which system works best depends on what the communities do and are for. For simply writing and reading about a general topic, weblogs allow more direct ownership of the platform and greater individualisation. For communities focused on specific tasks, or of people who need to work closely together, the more hosted communities might better facilititate the more immediete need for communication.
Yes but… that’s the answer to a question which hardly anybody is afforded the luxury to ask. We don’t generally get to sit down and design how a community is going to work and which tools people are going to gravitate towards. If a community forum already exists and is working well then it is inherent in the current state of things that some of the members will also be drawn towards blogging, and this will probably have an effect, either positive or negative - perhaps both - on the community. You can’t discourage people from blogging if it’s going to happen anyway, but you could encourage them I suppose, if you thought that was appropriate.
The problem that I’m also contemplating, is what do you do if you have a really specialised question which you want to get some answers or opinionms about? If there is an existent forum about the topic or a related one, then that can be a very powerful means of reaching out and tapping into expert knowlege. But if you simply post your question on your blog, you’re not likely to have much luck. Then again, experts seem to enjoy answering queries so even if they withdraw to their blogs to some extent, they may still keep an eye on the forum as well. But will that be enough to keep the forums alive in an overall environment with ever increasing choices and proliferation of channels?
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Blogging and communities July 3, 2006
Posted by Andy Roberts in : blogs and community, tools , 1 comment so farBack in January I asked a question at a conference about CoPs and web2.0
“How are we going to hold the more fragile communities together when some of the key contributors may be increasingly tempted to publish their ideas mainly on their own blogs to the detriment of the overall level of interaction?”
Since then, there has been a discussion on ACTKM mailing list mostly entitled “Blogs vs Forums” which has thrown up some possible answers, for example the suggestion that forum discussions go deeper and last longer, whereas blog conversations (where they happen at all), tend to fizzle out quite quickly.
You have to be careful though, not to imagine that it’s in the comments attached to blog posts that conversations will normally take place. The comments area may look like forums, but they are not, and the real conversation taking place in the blogosphere tends to happen between blogs, typically with one blogger writing a post which picks up and develops an idea referencing what another blogger posted earlier on their own blog, and so on.
In such a way, possible blogging ”communities” bound together by hyperlinks, RSS, trackbacks, pings tags and searches may arise deliberately or spontaneously in a more or less decentralised fashion.
Jack Vinson certainly entertains the idea of blogging and communities
But are these bloggers, standing as they do somewhat aloof from the forums which they may also take part in, helping to draw in wider participation from the general web, through their high ranking in the search engines and engagement with wider communities, or are they drawing energy and ideas away from forums, diluting the special power of many-to-many asynchronous dialogue?
It is perhaps at the boundaries where the two worlds (blogs and forums) meet that interesting things are happening and future trends may perhaps be spotted.
is an online professional who initiated DARnet 
