Word of Mouth January 30, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : cider, Wiki , add a commentA Normandy cider producer asked where she could find UK cider enthusiasts with a view to taking out an advertisement, for example in the specialist press - monthly magazine.
So I wrote to the ukcider list, but I’m publishing here as well because there are some generalised ideas contained within which are also directly relevent to a couple of other projects I’m currently starting on.
…
There are two things I want to suggest, arising from your request. The first continues the discussion I was having with Andrew recently about competion. It strikes me that here in the UK, craft ciders are in competion for people’s money with other “luxury” products to a much larger extent than between each other. Beer and wine are probably the main competition, but also other beverages, fine food and perhaps even entertainments. But I won’t stretch it too far.
Secondly, In the modern connected world there is the idea that “word of mouth” is becoming more important than advertising. 
UK cider enthusiasts are right here on this group/forum/wiki and you can engage with us by simply writing about your own product and activities on a regular basis, as long as it takes the form of participation in a conversation not just posting one way announcements. It’s always a good idea to enhance and keep your own details up to date on the wiki as well - in your case this could be on the France page - Cidernaut_guide_to_France
as well as on the buy cider page if you are intending to provide an online order service to the UK
One active example, not a producer but a publican, is Steve Marquis of
the Blue Bell at Halkyn in North Wales.
.
Finally, there is now one trial commercial linked graphic advertisement on the http://ukcider.co.uk/buy.htm static page which is not exclusive and helps toward the annual bandwith fees for the wiki. I don’t believe that impinges on the community in any way by being there, and if you are interested in something similar then do get in touch.
Cornish Wreckers traditional prayer? January 29, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : Music, UK , 1 comment so farI was contacted by a researcher from BBC Radio 4 ‘You and Yours’ programme asking about Cornish wreckers. They had found my “Wreckers Prayer” lyrics and suggested that it’s a traditional prayer with variations around the UK. They might use it on Monday Jan 29th in a piece about the Branscombe beach wreck in Devon. ( ‘Listen again’ for this programme will be available from 3pm… )
My reply:
The words quoted are specifically mine from an original song ( in
verse ) I wrote in 2003, partly based on some cultural memory as I did
indeed grow up in Cornwall.You may quote them attributed to “Andy Roberts blog” if you like. I
haven’t written the music yet, but probably will do soon.The idea for the song came to me whilst I was in the North of Spain
and realised that the dark tradition of wrecking wasn’t unique to
Cornwall but is also referred to there and in Brittany and probably
happened anywhere there were dangerous rocks near shipping lanes with
poor people living on the coast.I have a vague memory of reading a version of a similar prayer (in
prose) displayed inside a church, which I think was on St Agnes Island
, but definitely on the Isles of Scilly. You might try and follow
that up if you can - good luck!
I’m impressed that my blog came up in google so quickly and with a little bit more searching you can also find reference to a BBC 1 TV programme - “Timber galore for Cornish wreckers” which went out in 2003 quoting this verse:
“Oh please Lord, let us pray for all on the sea
But if there’s got to be wrecks, please send them to we.”
listen or download for free via last.fm
Snow stops transport - homeworking? January 24, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : Microjobs, London , 1 comment so farThis is London reports:
Snow Cripples London Transport
“A dusting of snow across London has caused transport havoc this morning.”
It’s true. In the south of the UK we always feel embarrassed or frustrated when we think of how places like Canada or Scandinavia cope with loads of snow every winter. Here the smallest amount regularly takes us by surprise and it can easily reach a situation where everything stops. I walked a little more carefully than usual to avoid slipping up on the pavement and as I arrived at the tube station the annoucement board was notifying “Severe Delays on the District Line” and most other lines as well. So the trains which were running were already filled to capacity. I struggled on and in the end only lost a bout three quarters of an hour but many other Londoners will have phoned in and arranged to work at home for the day.
When that happens, people often get a lot more work done than when they are in the office or workplace. You have to wonder whether it would be better to do a certain amount of work from home as a matter of course.
And if you are working regularly from a home office then why would you want to restrict yourself to only working for one employer?
The Wreckers Prayer January 23, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : Music, UK , 3commentslisten or download for free via last.fm
“Oh Lord, please don’t let there be any shipwrecks,
Let the lighthouse shine out bright and clear.
But if you feel that there should be a shipwreck,
then please Lord, let that ship be wrecked here.
There’s a path all the way from the clifftop
to the caves down below and the sea
It’s steep and it’s loose and it’s slippery
You gotta mind how you go.
On a moonless night, you need a little light
We don’t want any accidents, you see.
Don’t let there be shipwrecks
Lighthouse shine out bright and clear
If there needs to be a tragedy at sea
then let the cargo be washed ashore here
Oh the living is hard down this way
the soil is all stoney and poor
We don’t have a port, no fish to be caught
There’s just what the tide brings ashore
And the duty free liquor in store.
Next time it happens, don’t let me be late
or allow too much salt water
to infiltrate
Please don’t let there be shipwrecks,
Let the lighthouse shine out bright and clear.
If there needs to be a tragedy at sea,
Let the next one be here.
- Andy Roberts 2003
Update 19/2/07 : free mp3 available to:
listen and download via last.fm
Also available at MySpace and Sellaband
Google NewsResponse to Stephen Clift January 23, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : politics, listservs , 1 comment so farOn Tim Erikson’s blog Stephen Clift replies to my comment re reply-to-sender in e-groups:
P.S. Andy, our decade long idea has always been that being “public” needed to be an affirmative choice. We want to avoid mistaken messages to all. We do need to point out that you must press “reply-to-all” in our welcome and future monthly reminder posts. Also, what we really need in Newham and other newer forums is a coordinated and aggressive recruitment drive. With 400 members this setting might make a lot more sense.
I am of course familar with the arguments for reply to sender, and I don’t agree with them. People have already made an affirmative choice to be public when they join a public forum. On the other hand the reply to sender default is more suitable to private networking type of communication rather than group discussion.
The fear of accident is a red herring which discloses a predisposition towards privacy rather than openness and the 400 number is arbitrary. Yahoogroups is probably the largest system of e-groups and many of them seem to work quite healthily with reply-to-group and over 1000 subscribers. And before the web, we had Usenet with undisclosed numbers of subscribers to each group, but reply-to-group set as default in all variations of newsreader software, and many subscribers coping with up to 200 messages per day in high traffic groups. I’ve been subscribed to a couple of majordomo e-groups which switched from reply-to-group to reply-to-sender at the dictat of the group owner and in both cases the traffic subsequently declined from a healthy series of ongoing overlapping topic discussions into sporadic postings with periods of inactivity such that the new visitor will find a dead group and move on. In other words, reply-to-sender artificially maintains an effectively less-than-critical mass.
But I guess you will carry on insisting on sticking with the decade long idea, after all they are your groups and sufficiently lurker friendly that we could all become lurkers with nothing to lurk in. Thousands of youth in newham have myspace and facebook accounts, but are in my opinion extremely unlikely to adopt the practice of denying spontaneity and consciousy complying with counter intuitive instructions to try and make a seriously uncool medium work for social groups. Is it deliberate policy to disenfranchise them in order not to embarrass the occasional big wig who doesn’t know what he’s doing?
First Believer January 21, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : Long Tail, Music , 6commentsWell what a breakthrough, my first believer and it’s not even my mum or my girlfriend! Many thanks to Graeme Mair - fuzzytnth who went on my Sellaband space and bought three shares. Who would have thought it.
I’ve also been promoting my new virtual record label on last.fm and that’s starting to propagate, although mySpace is probably the easiest to grow. The main thing is that there are some people out there who are enthusiastic enough about my new song Gernika and maybe after one has broken the ice it will be easier for the second and third believer etc, who knows.
Encouraging participation in the wiki world January 21, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : online facilitation, Wiki , add a commentThe DAR wiki doesn’t have trackbacks enabled like a blog but I can trace some connections back through my webstats referrals. Thus I found two blogs which have picked up on my wiki facilitation page and added some thoughts. The irony is not lost, of course. There I am having written about how to try and facilitate collaboration on a wiki and one of the tips is “don’t do it all yourself” So somebody writes “is it just me or did you do all this yourself?” Ha! thanks for helping…
Then some more people find the page, possibly through Nancy White blogging it - and they seem to find it useful and have some comments of their own to make. But they don’t edit the wiki to enhance the information there, they blog or blog-comment about it instead!
Meredith Wolfwater: Encouraging participation in the wiki world
Agnese Caruso: improving-participation-in-wikis
Both of these posts have attracted some comments, so there’s a bit of conversation going on which would normally get buried in the archives after a few days.
Now that’s something which it is possible to get all frustrated about, but I don’t any more because it’s an issue I’ve been tracking for several years now, and I can switch between viewing through the group perspective and the individual one more easily now.
I started out wondering whether individual bloggers will tend to withdraw to their blogs and post less to discussion groups, to the detriment of the traditional listserv and other types of many-to-many community. (Dave Snowden has been wondering this more recently, but I can’t find the reference)
the-question-of-blogging-and-communities
control-in-blogs-and-communities-and-flickr
About a year ago I asked this question:
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?
It’s all to do with the ownership of spaces, both real and interpreted. So now I’m trying to pull together some seperate ideas which I’ve been mulling over for a long time, and I won’t succeed today, but will make some progress, and in public. My learning about collaborative wiki facilitation came originally from the ukcider wiki, about a domain which has clear goals, practical outcomes and tends to be subscribed to by people with a more naturally cooperative consciousness. The domain with which DARnet concerns itself on the other hand, is mostly on the meta-level and is perhaps mainly of interest to people who are generally more predisposed to owning and controlling their own spaces, even on the topic of collective knowlege building. I think I knew that when I started, deliberately setting myself a much harder nut to crack, but with contingency plans and other side benefits. So what I’m trying to say here is simply that this:
* the domain type affects the style and level of collaboration
* individual blogs are not going to bleed discussion groups dry anytime soon
* wiki proliferation has already ended the ‘field of dreams’ scenario
* webstats are invaluable for tracing backlinks
The World is a dangerous place January 18, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : General , add a commentThere’s a dangerous storm blowing right now outside my window, more sustained than the fringe of the London Tornado. Probably worth checking Torro . meanwhile, the map below shows various hazard hotspots around the world as of today, 18th January 2007. That’s just a screenshot but if you go to the Havaria Information Services site you can click on each symbol on the map and read all about the various troubles. Then stay in, wherever you are! The world is a dangerous place.
via Happy Dave
Pbwiki support January 18, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : tools, Wiki , 1 comment so farI had a problem with my PBwiki which I use as a starting off point, to do list and temporary store. It’s a straightforward but very useful service which I have come to rely upon, so I wrote to the support email address.
My personal PBwiki which I’ve been using since 2005 has suddenly disappeared……Can you confirm this is a temporary malfunction and let me know when my data will be back online please?
Only six minutes later I received a reply from Ramit, Co-founder of PBwiki:
Thanks for your email, and I personally apologize for this inconvenience.
This morning, we discovered that a small number of PBwikis are experiencing problems allowing access to them. Our engineers are actively working to fix this issue right now. Please don’t worry-we’ve verified that no PBwiki data was lost, so your wiki will be fully available shortly. We expect to have this repaired within 1-2 hours.
Again, please accept my apologies, and thank you for using PBwiki.
And sure enough, it was fixed very shortly. So thankyou very much PBwiki for your excellent service.
Futurelab - Flux blog » learning platform January 18, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : edublog , add a commentThe glossy brochure which arrived through my door told scary stories of Personal Learning portfolios which are now being introduced in schools, later forming the basis of a lifetime psychometric profiling, not under the control of the learner but used by institutions, agencies, governments. People left to themsleves apparently, will create their own identity under the influence of peer groups which may not be considered appropriate, therefore the state should create their profile for them. Hmm.
The blog however, tells a very different story. One of the writers, Martin Owen, “gets it”.
Flux » Articles » The learning now arriving at platform…
TThe Learning Platform provision is a realisation of the dystopian view of ICT and education that Frank Webster and Kevin Robbins have warned us against since 1986. Webster and Robbins have suggested that the main thrust of application of ICT in education is an updated version of Henry Ford’s production method (neo-Fordism) to education. It maps onto a view that Ken Boston presented at a Futurelab conference that there are 3 phases to introducing ICT – first it is to use applications like word processing as a glass typewriter, in the second phase we automate our current practice. It is not until we reach a third phase do we transform your practice. Learning platforms are SO second phase.
At worst the Leaning Platform mentality is about tracking, delivery, assessment, recording… it is a production line, sausage machine vision of education. There is a paradox here. Just as we are waking up to Web 2.0 – the do-it-yourself-but-with-a-lot-of-others web we propose a highly constrained system for school. I am all for letting the computer take on a lot of the administrative load – however most learning platforms do come with a pre-defined neo-Fordist pedagogic model (even if its developers do not realise it). I am all for managed learning- but I would like to see learners doing some of the management. We already have a platform – it is a computer linked to the internet. We have an abundance of tools for working together. Interoperability comes from TCP/IP, XML and the HTML protocols. It is a point of departure to many exciting places.
The tools that are being produced for social software and web 2.0 applications develop almost organically, interoperate where needed (RSS feeds are wonderful) and respond to emerging needs. They do not try to predetermine what is needed by a platform or demand that a questionable vision of an education and training technical standard needs to be adhered to. These tools are responses to perceived user needs and vanish if they do not meet them. These systems take real advantage of the transformational power of the internet and do not propose to impose old ways of thinking onto it.
Educationists should consider embracing the small pieces , loosely joined mentality. The idea that we need an electronic learning factory is so out of touch with the real needs of our times
Yay for small pieces - cheap, fast and out of control!
is an online professional who initiated DARnet 
