Blog Action Day - individual action is not enough October 15, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : blog action day, blogs and community , 29commentsToday 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.
blogactionday
blog action dayEBay paid too much for Skype October 8, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : Community , 2commentsGood news for those of us who held out against the movement towards skype as a platform for internet discussions. The great promise of skype was to enable people who like telephones to carry on using something in the same way, whilst pretending it’s got something to do with online community and web2.0. It hasn’t. The whole point of the eBay marketplace is that it’s asysnchronous and searchable, which of course telephone chats are not.
eBay says it paid almost $1bn too much for Skype
eBay has admitted it paid far too much when it bought internet telephony company Skype for $2.6bn (£1.28bn) in 2005.
The web auction company said it was writing down the value of Skype. It is also paying $530m to several former Skype shareholders including founder Niklas Zennstrom, who is stepping down as chief executive.
This payout is significantly less than the $1.7bn that eBay could have handed over to former shareholders if Skype had hit various targets. When it bought the business in September 2005, eBay claimed it would integrate its web telephony services with its own online auction site.
Analysts speculated that buyers and sellers could use Skype to contact eBay customer services or talk to each other. This could have encouraged more people to use Skype.
The idea of reproducing the telephone network as a substitute for asynchronous computer enabled communications was always a retrograde step, a non starter. Use Skype to save a few pounds when you would have used expensive international phone services to call your relatives or colleagues overseas. Don’t use it to short-circuit community discussions or to invite favoured individuals into a subset of the conversation. Some people enjoy having the opportunity to talk at others, but that doesn’t anybody really wants to let themselves in for listening to sound of their voices for an extended period with no fixed end and no useful record of what was said.
SearchCoP: a Yahoo group October 7, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : COP , 2commentsThis may be of interest to at least two different sections of my readership. Those interested in search engines, intranets, and those who care about communities of practice.
I wonder how many practice communities would include the acronym “CoP” in the group name though, apart from the meta ones. But why not.
SearchCoP: a Yahoo group about intranet search « interviews with content managers and other IT professionals
SearchCoP: a Yahoo group about intranet search
October 6th, 2007In June 2007, Seth Earley and Avi Rappaport founded the Search Community of Pracitice (SearchCoP) Yahoo Group
Google Analytics for Action Research October 3, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : marketing, blogs and community, Action Research , add a commentI’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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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!
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
Community launch from an event September 3, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : distributed research, theory, Community, online facilitation, COP, edublog, web2.0 , 5commentsThinking about a community birth process which I’ve just witnessed during August, it seems appropriate to try and generalise and seek further applications. A month long training course, open and free to attend, generates a momentum of interest, good will, and community indicators.
“what are we going to do when it’s all over?”
“I’m really going to miss the daily podcasts”
“I’m a few days behind, will the content still be available?”
“this forum is the best I’ve ever been in”
So then one of the convenors makes the announcement that the thirty day challenge goes on forever, and an ongoing community of practice is born. Of course the momentum built up during an occasional time-delimited event cannot be sustained at the same level, which is just as well, but the chances of enough residual activity continuing to get a self-sustaining community off the ground are probably a lot greater through this method, whether pre-planned or not, compared with the precarious method of trying to build up a critical mass through recruiting ones and twos, adding member by member, month after lonely month.
And yet, often the last days of a temporary online gathering are used to acheive closure, to sum up, and say ‘thanks a lot, and goodbye’. I began to wonder what would happen if…..
What if the conference on Web2.0 in January 2006 had been encouraged to continue onwards in situ?
What if a hotseat event, where people gather to ask questions to an invited guest, were to be left open and made public to generate further discussion amongst the participants and others. Maybe each and every hotseat or conference has a potential to spawn a practice community, to provide a growing public space. Many will dwindle and peter out after a while but maybe some will flourish instead of being shut down and put away.
I’m sure there are a few other examples where an online learning event has spawned a persisitent community, but nowhere near as many as have been conveniently wrapped up and dispersed. It’s not as if anybody would be forced to hang around against their will, or that any measurable resources would be consumed to allow event based learning communities to live on.
Or to put it the other way around, if you are hoping to launch a distributed community of practice then consider starting off by organising a month long conference at a specific time and space, build up a sense of occasion and then take it from there.
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.
eMint evening on legal issues for online communities July 22, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : Community, online facilitation, London , 1 comment so farI’m really glad that David Wilcox blogged the emint seminar on legal issues facing online communities which we attended over a week ago:
Designing for Civil Society: On stealing virtual sex beds, and the risks in Facebook groups
An evening of presentations and discussion on Internet law may not sound gripping, but I’m really glad I went along the other day to an event organised by Lizzie Jackson of e-mint, and lawyers K&L Gates.
The question on my mind during most of the evening was mostly to do with how we can keep the legal questions, and more often just the fear of them, from becoming an obstacle to the free exchange of information and opinion on the internet. It was heartening to hear the legal experts impart that the technology is advancing way too fast for the legislative processes to stand any chance of catching up with it.
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