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debate: The end of the Organisation? February 21, 2008

Posted by Andy Roberts in : debate, blogs and community , 5comments

As with the recent open thread for lurkers, this post is one from a series which adopts different blogging patterns. At the suggestion of Joitske Hulsebosch the format is that of a debate, and the topic we have chosen is “The end of the organisation?” after an article by Michael Gilbert. Josien Kapma has kicked off the debate by arguing in favour of the premise that organisations are going to change unrecognisably in response to technology improvements in the means of communications, namely the internet. “The organizations of the future will not look like the organizations of today.”

So I shall adopt the contrary view and oppose the proposition.

I disagree that organisations are shaped by their communications. For me this is a secondary consideration, with the main shaping force being that of economics. I shall argue that as long as the fundamental economic relationships which lie at the base of society remain unchanged then nothing revolutionary is going to happen. A change in the mode of communication will cause big upheavals in some of the light industries which specialise in knowledge work, in publishing and media, that is certain. But these industries are not crucial to the means of sustaining our lives.
The more important work of providing food, shelter, health, transport, energy and infrastucture will continue pretty much the same, regardless of what is happening in the online world.

Ah but I hear objections already. This is surely cheating! For some people, and indeed the scope of the pertinent essay, the concern is with the so-called “non-profit” organisations, the civil society, and my arguments have flown straight outside the boundaries of the arena.

I will also argue that in an economy which is run for and by the owners of big business, the values which are predominant at all levels are those which support the continuation of the system based on free market economics and the private ownership of the means of prodution. The non-profits are not islands of activity which work in isolation. They are part of the wider society, their clients and employees have to live in the current world and their values and economic relations end up reflecting those of the corporations to defend the status quo.

Open thread for lurkers February 9, 2008

Posted by Andy Roberts in : distributed research, blogs and community , 17comments

This is an “open thread” patterned blog post which means that I’m not writing on any particular topic, instead I’m leaving it open to my readers to initiate discussion by bringing up any subject you’d like to talk about, or even just to say hullo.

behind the curtain According to conventional wisdom the ratio of lurkers to posters in any online forum tends to be around the 10:1 level, depending on the nature of the topic and I probably only know about a handful of people who would seem to be regular readers. I know there are more out there though, and this is your opportunity to “delurk” as they say, to come out from hiding in the silent shadows and acquire a voice of your own.


There must be something that’s been on your mind, let’s get it out with.

Come on in, the water’s lovely :-)

blue water and white chairs by the swimming pool

CC photo credit “The truth lies behind the blurry curtain” by assbach

Critique of this blog February 4, 2008

Posted by Andy Roberts in : 31daychallenge, distributed research, blogs and community, tools , 2comments

Ning Group

I went to the better blog Ning group which is kind of a community of practice for some bloggers, and asked for a critique of my blog, from the point of view of a new reader. It’s one of the tasks in Darren Rowse’s 31 day challenge. Then I hid under the duvet and waited to see what, if anything, might arise. Christine Martell responded with a screencast which is a great way to review any website.

Screencast

The screencast is hosted at screencast.com which means I can’t at present embed it here, so here’s an ordinary text link to go and listen to Christine as she explores this blog and remarks upon it, followed by my response below:

http://www.screencast.com/t/GrQpa0kXhC

Response

Many thanks for the screencast Christine, you gave me several things to think about and work on there. That was a great way to communicate about a blog’s functionality and hopefully took up a bit less of your time than typing up a critique. You also hit the nail exactly on the head straight away by exposing the central problem that I’m grappling with - the combination of several seemingly unrelated themes or niches into one blog. The only thing that ties them altogether is the common author, myself. So I have diverse target audiences, apart from the very small audience that may be interested in me, friends and family so to speak. So I’m always trying to isolate the categories and pages into slices that can be consumed on their own. What I discovered from Google Analytics is that certain individual posts can gain an audience of their own, coming from the search engines and then moving onwards. This is in fact how I’ve started to derive a small income from the blog, to recoup expenses, through some individual posts in the archive. But a series of individual disconnected posts does not a blog make. Which is why I set myself the goal of increasing RSS subscriptions and joined in the current 31daystoabetterblog group, to see if I can bring it all together a bit more. One thing I’m considering is to see if I can provide a selection of RSS feeds for the main categories. That’s better than having separate blogs, although I do have some of those as well!

Action points from the critique:

Is it time to consider changing themes? Probably not in the middle of all this other activity.

Thanks again Christine for giving great feedback.

Oh, and I’ve also wondered about the feeling of being ‘watched’ and spotlighted by mybloglog as we surf around each other’s blogs, not at all anonymously. I suppose we are assumed to have taken that on board when we join that service. I’ve tried three of these type of things and ditched the other two. I also upgraded mybloglog for the better stats, which I find very useful in combination with Google Analytics.

Now over to other readers:

What did you think of Christine’s screencast and my response? Can you help me understand better some of the issues raised, or maybe add your own points please? I promise not to turn it into a blog all about blogging, there are enough of those already.

London Bloggers January 28, 2008

Posted by Andy Roberts in : london bloggers, blogs and community, London , 1 comment so far

Andy Bargery, who I met at a London Geek dinner last year, has set up a new home for London Bloggers, which is a blog of course, and a meetup tomorrow evening near Waterloo. I’ll be there. If you haven’t registered already, it’s too late but why not subscribe to the blog and come to the next one in February.

Welcome to the Home of London Bloggers
If you live in London and write a blog then you might be interested to come along to the regular London Bloggers Meetup. The next event is on Tuesday 29th January at the Camel & Artichoke Pub near to Waterloo, check out the Meetup page for more info.

If you can’t make it, check back here in early Feb for a round-up of the event and quite possibly a handful of photos. Then of course you can register for the next event in Feb.

If you are a London Blogger you might also want to add yourself to the London Bloggers Wiki page

Bird flu fiction as a blog January 14, 2008

Posted by Andy Roberts in : blogs and community, UK , 4comments


The avian influenza or Bird flu H5N1 virus represents an all too serious threat to the world population as experts are predicting an pandemic not as a question of “if” but “when”. Here’s an effort in public consciousness raising through the medium of fictional writing, and in the format of a blog.

dominieschronicle.blogspot.com

The story has already started but it won’t take long to catch up on all the posts from January 2nd to date and then probaby the best way to experience would be by subscribing to an RSS feed but there doesn;t seem to be one working at present.

Also there has been an outbreak of visitors from the Flu wiki who don’t seem to appreciate the subtleties of “in character blogging” or that the events are situated in in a Scottish cultural setting.

Blogrush phase 2 is active October 31, 2007

Posted by Andy Roberts in : internet, blogs and community, web2.0 , add a comment

After testing my patience for a little too long, Blogrush phase 2 is now active. This means that the silly “under construction” notice has gone from the dashboard and been replaced by some nice graphs and stuff. To me, the statistical charts seem pretty self explanatory but blogrush members are urged to watch a rather long screencast video which explains it all, feature by feature, and promises some more future developments.

blogrush.jpeg

So rather than take the blogrush widget off from this blog, as I was getting close to doing this week, I decided to keep it for a further extended trial period, in fact I’m almost impressed with some of the extra thougt which has now gone into this service. If you have a blog which is focussed on a particular niche topic, then you may have some considerable success in attracting new readers through this widget, so if you haven’t already, you can sign up to blogrush here and become part of my extended referral network.

Backtracking: I first wrote about blogrush on September 16th in mybloglog romlet or blogrush and Linda also wrote blogrush or blogroll

Blog Action Day - individual action is not enough October 15, 2007

Posted by Andy Roberts in : blog action day, blogs and community , 29comments

Today is Blog Action Day which means that lots of bloggers will be writing on one general topic for one day in an attempt to see what might be achieved through coordinated posting, and I am one of them so my humble contribution amongst the hundreds of thousands is entitled “individual action is not enough”.

The topic for this year’s blog action day is “the environment”.

“Bloggers Unite - Blog Action Day”

The idea of bloggers mass action as a concept is not yet proven by any means, but it’s certainly worth participating if only for the “blog carnival” effect but it’s also quite possible that a critical mass of blog posts on one single day will have some sort of lasting effect which cannot be exactly anticipated in nature, but will almost certainly be different to the normal flow of conversations in the blogosphere.

The aim is to push an issue onto the table for discussion, the issue being “the environment”.

If I have time, I shall attempt to synthesise between the idea of thousands of bloggers uniting to take visible action for one day, and the type of uncoordinated individual action which is most usually promoted as the best means to deal with environmental issues. I’m not sure I’ll be able to pull that off though, and I may just end up quoting from a book review which I read recently which puts it very well:

He criticises Tim Flannery for his emphasis on individual action to stop global warming.

Pearse writes: “The reality is that even if every Australian totally eliminated their residential emissions it would not result in significant absolute cuts in Australia’s emissions; by 2050 emissions might rise by 60% instead of by 70%…the changes we make at the personal level would account for at best 20% of the change required.”
…
High and Dry is the best book yet written on the climate change debate in Australia – especially because of its emphasis on the dominant role of industry in doing the polluting. Strongly recommended

So apart from the odd personal post about the song thrush in my own garden, how does ‘distributed research’ relate to the environment? Well I can think of many ways, not least of which is the subject of home working which I have been writing about for some time. Home working or telecommuting is hugely beneficial to the environment in terms of energy, materials, carbon emissions and congestion but of course it will take a major transformation in the economy before homeworking can become an option for more than a small minority of people who happen to work in the “information” industries. The technology already exists for a low impact economy to be viable without loss of quality of life, indeed it will be greatly improved, but first there is a mountain of vested interest in the status quo which needs to be shifted and for that, individual action is not enough. There needs to be a fundamental policy change, which in turn requires a thorough regime change on all political and economic levels. Taking steps towards bringing about these political changes are the only actions which will actually make any progress towards the eventual rescue of the planet. Changing the bathroom light bulb, all by yourself, and then feeling better about it may on the other hand, be a step towards allowing the present system to continue on its path of anarchic destruction of everything.

Blog action day is a form of collaborative mass action, even if it only consists of writing. The important thing is that the mass action can become self-conscious. The online equivalent to being able to feel the strength of a quarter of a million people in Trafalgar Square will be the results of tracking thousands of posts tagged with the words “blog action day”, the recognition and mutual commenting which will go on between bloggers, and the continuation of the developing conversation for days and weeks after Bog Action Day is over.

Google Analytics for Action Research October 3, 2007

Posted by Andy Roberts in : marketing, blogs and community, Action Research , add a comment

I’m using Google Analytics as a metric to provide quantitative data towards an Action Research cycle.

Web Stats

I get pretty good web logs and working awstats from my web hosting provider for distributedresearch.net, but back in August I decided to try adding the Google Analytics package as part of an Action Research approach towards improving the effectiveness of my blog.

Action Research

Action Research is more than just testing and tracking, but the testing and tracking methods used by professional internet writers, bloggers, developers and marketers begin to look quite similar to distributed action research in some aspects since they are being applied in complex adaptive situations where pure quantitative metrics and ideas such as a ‘fair test’, split testing and testing against a control set are mostly inapplicable.

Goals

The specific and limited aspect of the blog which I have been trying to improve in this way has been the attraction of new visitors to specific posts via the search engines. So I added the Google Analytics code, that’s one action in itself and a very powerful one, and I adopted a more consciously search engine friendly writing style for a series of posts. The research programme ran for about six weeks but during that time I was also making other adjustments to the overall performance of the blog. So there is no way that I can attribute any increase in traffic as being entirely due to one specific action, but that is OK because my goal is to improve the reach of the blog, it isn’t to prove a point. Besides, when you are dealing with unknowns such as the Google ranking algorithm or the interactions between thousands of publishers and tens of thousands of casual web surfers then nothing is either constant or predictable. A page can drop from position number 5 on the first page of search results down to number 13 over the page for two days, and then return at position number 3. The amount of traffic thus fluctuates wildly for those few days with no action having been taken on my part. The totality of all the variables involved is unknowable in a complex adaptive system, but that doesn’t mean research is impossible. You can still prod and probe and gain actionable insights, that’s what action research is all about

Where Google Analytics helps is in the automatic generation of trend tracking graphs for multiple slices of data, which is just great for research purposes. I can look at the traffic which arrived via search engines for the period involved and see a nice upwardly moving path.

google analytics for action research

So some of my actions may be working well, and I can drill down further to visualise traffic for specific posts, see the most popular pages, aggregate data for individual keyphrases and then zoom back out to see the overall picture.

Analytics of All Sources

Those little saw teeth are spikes caused by StumbleUpon by the way. The temporary traffic increase from that route is fleeting and not sustained, but may pick up one or two more interested readers, you never know.

The optimised posts combined are steadily gaining attention according to the stats, but what are the limitation of this approach?

Limitations of Google Analytics

Google Analytics provides only quantitative data. For Action research to provide a full picture you need to collect qualitative data, which would means gathering narrative from the visitors and readers - not an easy task with distributed action research based around search engine traffic, but not impossible either. Any ideas posted in the comments to blog posts for example would count as valuable qualitative data. Watching over a friends shoulder as they search and surf is another way to gain insights as to some of the alternative habit which different people adopt. Then there is all the data in my RSS reader which comes in as a mixture of advice from subject experts and experiential narratives from fellow learners.

Reflection

Action Research requires a process of reflection between cycles. This prevents the process from running away on its own momentum, provides a check that events are moving in a direction which is in line with stated goals and values, and offers an opportunity to asl wider question which may reveal deeper insights leading to a positive change of direction for the action research project overall.

referral stats

The graph of traffic via referral causes me to pause. In pursuing one goal, search engine traffic, am I leaving some previously regular readers behind. That’s a known risk, but I wonder to what extent there may be conflict between subtly optimising for search engine traffic and providing value for regular readers. I hope to have kept any such conflict to an absolute minimum, but what do you think? Can I realistically spend two months working on one type of traffic, then just switch over to a different focus for another period, perhaps engaging with regular readers more or attracting RSS subscribers. Or could it possibly be a better approach to try and combine everything at once, always considering every aspect?

data links

The four posts which have been attracting most search traffic are

couscous recipe
homemade scratter
what is bluetongue disease
theatre breaks in london

MyBloglog, Romlet or BlogRush? September 16, 2007

Posted by Andy Roberts in : internet, wordpress, blogs and community, web2.0 , 6comments


In this post I am going to review three similar on-blog widgetised linking services. All three are currently in my sidebar here, displaying links of one sort or another and tracking visits. I also use the excellent Facebook application “Blog Friends” but that works a bit differently, and was covered earlier.

Blogrush is the newest, being released only yesterday, and at the time of writing it’s temporarily broken.

blogrush

I’m sure they’ll fix it soon.

MyBlogLog

MyBlogLog is the oldest and best established. I like it for the simple idea of displaying visitors faces, which can creep up as a loose sense of community eventually, and also for the three column layout of the stats page. It flows naturally from left to right, showing where visitors came from, what they viewed, and where they left for.

mybloglog stats

For a quick glance analysis, this is so much more intuitive than for example Google Analytics. Disadvantages are that it can often take three clicks to make a reciprocal visit, navigating the pages at MyBlogLog itself. With practice you can get this down to two clicks, by paying careful attention to the links as illustrated below:

click here

ROMlet


I was invited to Romlet beta via MyBlogLog with whom they are really a direct competitor.

ROMlet is a brand new blog widget that incorporates the best aspects of a brag badge, stats counter, bookmarking tool and popularity booster. JOIN THE COMMUNITY now and then sign up take part in the beta release!

ROMlet
As a beta product, it’s not at all clear where ROMlet is headed for now. The service is so simple that it hardly seems to do anything. The so-called “brag badge” is a collection of icons which give out a certain amount of referral stats data, which is not really something that I consider adds value for my visitors, nor particularly for myself. I did have a little trickle of traffic when one of my articles was popular enough to appear on their front page for a while, but if the service becomes at all well used then I would expect this to be an increasingly rare occurrance, thus undermining its own success. So all a bit baffling really, and I’ll probably take it off in due curse.

BlogRush

Blogrush is the newest, currently getting a lot of attention from marketing bloggers, which betrays the origin of the service. There’s a multi-level referral scheme which is supposed to favour early adopters so if you are interested in these type of things then it’s best to get set up with BlogRush sooner rather than later. The only danger I perceive is that with all the multi level marketers jumping on board from the off, the service could well prove Hugh’s Law to be correct right from the start.

Conclusion

Hmm, do I need to write a conclusion? It’s fairly clear that MyBlogLog is providing a lasting service which slowly helps to build some level of blogging community and relationships, as well as the handy stats. Linda pointed out that in some ways it’s a shame that these automated and uncontrolled systems have taken over from the manual blogroll to some extent, and I can see that personal choice may be diminished. With Blog Friends, you can choose to filter your reading of friends of friends blogs ( I’d rather read my friends‘ blogs unfiltered ) and with BlogRush you can choose which category to associate with, and you can also choose to take it off altogether - something which is very easy and non-destructive with widgets for Wordpress 2.2

PajamaNation CEO blog August 25, 2007

Posted by Andy Roberts in : Pajamanation, blogs and community , add a comment

Walter de Brouwer, CEO of pajamanation has been blogging almost daily for over a week now, over on PajamaNationBlog


PajamaNation CEO blog

By reading Walter’s blog now and subscribing you can appreciate the detailed vision that he has for the enterprise called pajamanation, for the changing world of work and also gain an insight into his unique way of creating a company.

For those interested in blog community structures, the linkroll in the righthand sidebar is actually a list of invited joint authors of the blog, which is managed from within the blogger platform. Public comments are enabled now, and Walter also invites individuals from the company to write posts. My name is there, and I wrote Joining the conversation.

As the story of this company begins to unfold a lot more rapidly starting next month, there’s one thing we can be all be certain of. There will always be plenty of surprises.