PajamaNation CEO blog August 25, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : Pajamanation, blogs and community , add a commentWalter de Brouwer, CEO of pajamanation has been blogging almost daily for over a week now, over on PajamaNationBlog
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.
Opinion: Facebook is killing personal blogging August 14, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : facebook, blogs and community , 3comments
Here’s a point of view that seems to be coming from a different perspective compared with much of what is written within that which is sometimes referred to as the “technorati blogosphere”. And just because of that, I think it’s worth taking notice. Stuart Dredge writes about Facebook and blogging:
Tech Digest: Opinion: Facebook is killing personal blogging
When it launched, Vox was all about getting your mum and less tech-savvy friends to blog without needing a certificate in geekery. It’s a great, well-designed, easy-to-use service. Yet my friends and family aren’t on Vox; they’re on Facebook. One of my aunts is on Facebook. They don’t want to blog, but they do want to be part of a social network that lets them communicate in bite-sized chunks of text or media.And that’s the problem for blogging companies. People who’ve blogged in the past won’t necessarily dump LiveJournal or Blogger. But all those millions of new people who were supposed to take personal blogging into the mainstream? I don’t think that growth is going to happen.
Interesting?
Blog Friends growth accelerates to 10% a day August 2, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : facebook, blogs and community, London, web2.0 , 1 comment so farSomething seems to be working very well with Luke and Jof’s Blog Friends Facebook application, announced last month. The functionality has been increased to catch blogs from friends of friends, which makes the ‘discovery’ aspect a winner. ( Hint: I already my friends’ blogs anyway, unfiltered). There’s also an easy one click link to a blog post to be read from within Facebook. I hesitated about that for a second, but decided it’s a good thing - just like providing full posts in RSS feeds - as long as they don’t start enabling comments right there within Facebook, because then a blog on blog friends will have the potential to evolve as a split community - part inside Facebook and part outside on the internet. Maybe some people will figure out that’s OK, but I’ll be wary.
I’ve been tracking the membership growth with another Facebook app called “appsoholic” which today produced the graphs below. The previous time I noticed the growth was at 8% a day, which is very fast by most standards, but this has now increased to 10% a day which may indicate an accelerating rate of expansion. Well done!
That 10% puts blog friends in the top 40 of Facebook applications for daily growth rate, still according to appsaholic, whilst being ranked at 740 for size.
Blog Friends app on Facebook July 18, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : theory, facebook, blogs and community, web2.0 , 2comments
Introducing ‘Blog Friends’, a new application on Facebook which fills an apparently simple yet imporant niche. This is what it does:
- Track blog posts by your Facebook friends—on topics that interest you
- Showcase those posts on your Facebook profile
- Watch your friends grow your blog readership for you in return
It’s just been launched as a public Beta by Luke Razzell, who has been blogging on the topic of “Identity” for several years now, so we can expect the theoretical underpinning of the application design to be a sound one. It certainly seems to have all the makings of a succesfull Facebook app, including the capacity to spread virally, and appealing to the needs of bloggers to attempt to reach wider audiences. Every thing has been well thought out including the name, logo, taglines and this graphic:
And this is what it looked like from inside Facebook over the weekend:
Notice the RSS icons - this is one application which allows you to take your data outside of Facebook instead of just sucking things in. So it drives a small hole into the ‘walled garden’ criticism of the fashionable Facebook fad.
Outside in my feedreader I’m suddenly discovering a number of new blogs and posters, within my specified areas of interest, all thanks to my blog friends. And no, I don’t have any financial or other stake in the enterprise, I simply volunteered to alpha test out of of interest and because I’ve known Luke as a blogger for a long time. The fact that the whole application was developed from specification to working Beta in around three weeks has staggering implications for the future of web apps and Facebook.
Interfacing blogs and Facebook July 16, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : facebook, blogs and community , 2commentsThe interface between blogs and Facebook is throwing up interesting dilemmas. There are various ways to import blog posts, so that they show up on a user profile, application or minifeed within Facebook. But there is no RSS back out again. So whilst it may be desirable to have blogs exposed within FB where the critical mass of presences may lead to new readers and friends, the overall osmotic pressure is ultimately an inward one, slowly pulling more and more of the activity in behind the walled garden. That’s something Linda worries about too.
For example, my recent post on this topic gained a useful comment from an old friend who is now on Facebook as well. But his comment was posted right there, where he read the post. Inside the wall. So what do I do?
I’ve replied in situ and I’m tempted to reproduce the comment here. At this stage it would have to be without identifying the author, but that’s something I’m not happy about. So I’ll wait for consent or clarification. Instinctively I feel that any technology which mitigates towards the unconscious splitting of conversations is probably not desirable, so I’ll also look again at the different methods for importing feeds into Facebook and choose carefully.
Facebook MySpace and Linkedin friends July 14, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : facebook, Flickr, Music, blogs and community, tools , 6comments
Escape from Cubicle Nation asks Are there any rules for social/business networking? We’re talking about Facebook, MySpace and Linkedin here.
Unless you have been hiding under a rock, as a person who deals with the business of networking on the internet, you are aware that Linkedin, Facebook and MySpace are important places to see and be seen. If you are growing a business and want exposure and connection with your target audience, it is critical to explore these online communities.
The question is, how in the world do you know how or where to be seen, and most importantly, with whom?
It’s a good question, and I would add Twitter, MyBlogLog and Flickr to the conundrum. But don’t expect any finished answers, because this is a question you have to keep asking yourself from time to time for each network you are in. I’m just going to list some practices which I’ve adopted or observed for each.
Flickr
This is the only one which allows for some granularity of the relationship, on three levels. Family, Friends and Contacts. There’s also a strong link to my city, London, in the way I use it so my friends tend to be people I’ve met in person, or might do. Contacts are like bookmarks to people’s photostreams I want to keep track of.
MySpace
I have a musician’s MySpace so that’s slightly different, but not much. MySpace can turn into a pointless game, and I lost interest after a while. Initially I collected a bunch of links to people, mainly from the past, who influenced my own music. So my Top friends list was like an indication of taste. When new friend requests came in, (mostly from other musicians who are playing the game of “add, add, add”) I would check them out and be a bit discerning. There are some important connections to be made in Myspace, but eventually they get swamped by many extremely loose ties. If you stop adding, the interest in your profile dies. So now you can choose to block add requests from musicians, which shows how silly it has all become as a means of reaching a potential audience.
There are two types of LinkedIn users. Normal sensible people, and “power users”. These are essentially spammers who will link in with anybody in order to leverage their extended network for marketing purposes. They break the terms and conditions by advertising their email address as part of the name field, and thus allow total strangers to become their trusted business contacts.
LinkedIn is great for keeping an online CV, access to contact details and for recruitment. Link to real friends, business colleagues and important contacts. After that, there’s not much to do. With the new Answers function you can get useful suggestions or build a reputation by answering others.
MyBlogLog
MyBlogLog has crept up on me and I’m starting to find it interesting. When a new face appears in my sidebar widget I usually check. They have a function whereby if you visit another members blog a few times you get automatically added to their circle. So I think the general idea is to be quite free with your adds on this one, and it may help slowly to build readership, by seeding clusters of bloggers with common interests.
I’m getting twitter spam follower notifications already so activating the “Turn all your followers into friends” button seems like a really bad idea.
I saved the hot one for last.
Facebook has a tradition of using real names and reflecting real life friendships from its origins in the colleges. This is now changing a bit, with the wide open membership and platform but it shouldn’t end up like mySpace. Within Facebook there are the new applications, and some of these are linked with external apps which have their own social networking aspects. It’s not yet clear how all of this is going to settle out.
General Reflection
My approach seems to be generally a cautious one, attempting to keep a sense of real value in the connections I make. In some ways I may be missing opportunities to enlarge the circle, and I’m sure I should be doing more to nurture the connections which are already in place. Having a transparent online identity which is prolific and probably important to my longer term strategy engenders a certain reluctance to engage in aggressively direct marketing activities. I’m also having some thoughts about the bidirectional nature of add friend requests.
I’ll come back to this topic again, but now throw the question out to you. What are your own rules for adding friends in the different online networks and how do you see the general territory developing?
Blog Challenge: Your Blog Story July 9, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : facebook, blogs and community, edublog , add a commentLorelle on Wordpress issues occasional challenges to inspire readers to blog.
This week’s blog challenge is to blog your blog’s story.
What is the story behind your blog?
I want to know the story behind why you decided to blog. What made you believe you had something to blog about? How did you pick your first blog and why did you settle on the blog you have now? What inspires you, motivates you to keep blogging? What’s your blog about and why did you choose the topic?
Greg Balanko-Dickson took up the challenge, and I’ve decided to follow the example. So here is
My Blog Story
Community, research, art, technology, self publishing and significant learning.
Learning Journal
When I signed up for my degree in 2003 I was told to start up a Learning Journal. This could be in a notebook, a diary, a looseleaf binder or a word-processing document. The adventurous, I was told, could include photographs, sound recordings or even video, but this was not required.
I had already heard about blogs. My son had already started one, but I hadn’t yet seen the point in it.
Switching Hosts
So I registered at blogger.com and started to write about my course. There were two or three other students who had set up blogs too, and in due course we found each other. Then the institution itself became aware when Tom Smith returned on sabbatical, evangelistic about blogging. Tom explained the importance of RSS reading for cultivating the blogging habit. But blogger didn’t output RSS at the time, so we recommended blogdrive for students. I had already registered on the multi user Movable Type installation so I kept that one.
This meant I could upload photographs and video, and it was in the days before Flickr or youTube so my blog became a multimendia showcase for a while, in which I indulged myself with blogging as ART.
By the final year I was getting frustrated at being hosted by the University so I set up my own domain with an installed Wordpress blog and a Mediawiki. The old Movable Type blog was eventually killed off by the ultralab, but I had already exported all of the posts and comments, though sadly missed some of the files. That’s now hosted here, for reference.
Research Project
The new blog was to be an integral part of my undergraduate research project, as well as an online CV and tool for developing my own network. I used the Wordpress ‘page’ format with comments to prepare and host my online exhibitions and collect feedback, which worked well for me.
After I graduated, I wanted to keep up the blog in order to build my reputation and increase my network of friends and contacts. It takes a fair amount of work, and sometimes feels thankless but I carry on. One week it feels like I’m making steady small steps of progress, another like bumping along the bottom.
Music
I found some time to return to my interest in songwriting and performance, discovered the delights of garageband (The MAC app, not the website) and used another WP page as my base for putting some of my songs online. Gernika got its own subpage.
UK
Since becoming Country Manager UK for pajamanation, I made a concious effort to orientate some posts more towards the UK, since that’s a target audience. I thought about setting up a new blog specifically for pajamanation writings, but decided to keep it here and promote my own blog at the same time. Just in case. I do have some others though, the ukcider blog, usefulwiki blog and a new one about turning freelance. There may be problems defining the boundaries for that but I’ve thought it through and it does make sense to me.
plugins
Recently I finally got around to upgrading from the legacy WP1.5 - by exporting all posts and comments, installing a brand new WP2.2 and re-importing. I’d tried the straight upgrade path before without sucess. Since then I’ve become obsessed with trying out all the plugins and themes which have become available, fiddling with the settings and watching what they do. I love it! So from now on if I do manage to write some compelling content, at least the funtionality and format of the blog won’t be an obstacle to people finding it and interacting.
On the other hand, I note that Hugh thinks blogging is less useful these days, and anybody starting out would be better off building their network in Facebook groups and twitter. Hmm, I’ll use those tools as well but I can’t see myself being prised away from my Wordpress blogs any year soon.
What’s your blog story?
Well that’s my blog story. It felt a bit self indulgent and I’ll have to reflect a little on what I may have learned through the telling of it at this stage. (Perhaps as the subject for a Gibbs reflective cycle.)
So what’s your blog’s story?
Death of blogging - film at 11 July 5, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : facebook, blogs and community , add a commentIs it just the weather or have lots of bloggers seen their traffic go down lately?
Hugh MaCleod notes that it’s because of the rise in popularity of social networking sites, particularly facebook and twitter and welcomes the trend.
gapingvoid: The time of the a-list is dead.
I totally applaud this development. Whatever your blogging strategy may be, I personally believe that on average, you’re far better off going off to somewhere like Facebook and building your own social network with like-minded folk, based on your own collective interests, your own collective passions and own collective sense of merit, than loitering around the Blogopshere, waiting for some rockstar like Scoble, Arrington, Cory etc to link to you.
Meanwhile twitterers are trying out pownce, and micro-video-blogging is on its way…
So is the read/write web becoming more and more the victim of fickle fashion?
Because comments are social objects too June 25, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : social objects, blogs and community , 1 comment so farApplying the theory of object centred sociality to a blog, it seems reasonable to deduce that the main social object is the blog post or article, ( that which used to be called a ‘blog’ before weblogs themselves took the name). Comments are logically subsidiary to articles but it can also be the case, especially with popular blogs, that each comment has the potential to become a social object around which new activities can be linked. So it was bothering me on this blog, ever since I upgraded to Wordpress 2 and adopted the regulus theme, that the permalinks to individual comments were broken.
Sometimes it’s necessary to deep link in to a particular comment in order to provide context for a further response or to show where a point has already been answered etc. Or a discussion elsewhere may wish to crosslink.
Not only that, but the “Recent Comments” section in my sidebar needs to go straight to them, which was not happening correctly.
I checked out the theme author’s site for bug reports, but he’s done a great job and moved on. The work is considered ‘finished’. So I’d have to get my hands dirty and do a bit of PHP coding myself. That’s not something I’m currently experienced in, but neither am I afraid to tackle new languages as long as there are some examples to follow.
In the end I added one line of code into the comment.php file and changed another. That’s it. Done.
I should now try and find a way to offer the modification back in case the author would like to incorporate it.
Flu bloggers validated June 18, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : Bird Flu, blogs and community , 3commentsVia Nancy White a report that seems to show how ‘flu bloggers’ are making a difference over in America:
Spare Change: HHS Flu Blog Success?
We’ve got a clear clarion call from the Secretary of HHS, to go forth into our communities and spread the pandemic awareness message. We’ve been validated, at least unofficially, as being partners in the national effort to prepare for a pandemic. And our voices, for the first time, have been heard on this issue.
In case you hadn’t gathered, the flu bloggers are on a mission. The general apathy about this burning issue is blamed on the Media, Government and public. The story, so it goes, just isn’t exciting enough at this stage:
It often moves at a glacier pace, much of the `action’ occurs in remote areas of the world where few reporters have access, and with the exception of a few dedicated flubies, most of the public simply doesn’t care about the latest genetic sequences or the seroprevalence studies on cats in Jakarta.
It’s a bit like 1999 when billions of people around the world failed to dig their own bunkers, stock up on cans of beans and guns to defend against looters in preparation for the inevitable barbarism that would follow Y2K. Outside of the United States we just don’t seem to have that ‘circle the wagons’ mentality.
is an online professional who initiated DARnet 
