Internet
Location Independent Again
So I’m trying to do some blogging and so on from a location away from home again. The mobile dongle is kind of working intermittently here by the harbour, and I haven’t tried driving to higher land in search of a stronger signal yet. I did find a pub with wi-fi in the next village and we tried that one afternoon. I couldn’t help thinking that it would be a bit of a shame if this becomes the future of pubs – people sitting down by themselves staring at laptops while nursing half a pint.
Another possibility for the future of pubs is as a local community service where you can go to collect your parcels and other deliveries.
Free FTP Client Software – Using Filezilla to update Websites
Free FTP Client Software for Windows
Filezilla is a free and open source FTP client software program used for connnecting to a webserver to update websites. Here’s a short tutorial video which deals with downloading, setting up and connecting Filezilla FTP to a website. I describe the twin pane approach, and show you how to download a website file, edit it , test and then re-upload so the new version is live on your website.
This Filezilla video can be watched from right here below as an embedded YouTube video, do try the HD (High Definition) and full screen options:
Or you can download the full original 84Mb video file onto your computer using the free file hosting service at divshare: Download Filezilla FTP Video Tutorial
Filezilla FTP client software is available in Windows, Mac OS X and Linux versions.
Good alternative FTP clients apart from Filezilla are Cute FTP for Windows and Mac (small charge) , and on a Mac there are also Fetch and Cyberduck.
BBC News as delivered by PhotoPeach Feedshow
Photopeach suggest that you might consume internet news such as this feed from the BBC in this style while drinking a morning coffee.
Daily Feedshow: BBC News on PhotoPeach
Click on the rolling slideshow at any point and it takes you to the relevant news item on the BBC news site.
Could you get used to this synthetic speech slideshow?
Bon appetit.
Best UK Web Hosting
I seem to be constantly looking for the best UK web hosting service, either to try out new projects or else when an existing host becomes insufferably bad.
I’ve had various recommendations over the months and compiled most of them onto a wiki page: Web Hosting but it’s hard to do any kind of comparison so I usually have several in a state of trial at any one time. Moving stuff over from one web host to another is not exactly trivial so it’s a bit like the home utilities companies, you get stuck with a service you know isn’t necessarily the best value – inertia I think they call it. Then there’s the whole question of whether ti use UK web hosting at all or take advantage of some very cheap US hosting deals. Overselling is another thorny topic.
Maybe someone out there knows better, what’s the best web hosting you’ve used so far?
How Not To Use Online Communities
I’ve just read a message on the ukcider community email list which warrants a response on the meta level about how online communities can be a fantastic resource for research and tapping into a multitude of volunteer information and advice, but only when approached in the right way. Journalists are usually the worst culprits, depending on the domain, and PHD candidates can be a bit single minded too, but anybody could fall into a similar trap and end up disappointed so I’ll try to provide an explanation of how to communicate with online communities and how not to do it. First the quote:
I joined this newsgroup because i have an interest in making
cider … and I have found the advice gained very useful. ..the other reason for joining is that I have just completed a book about cider (I am a photographer)
When I first joined, two years ago, I posted on here, explaining that
I was doing a book and wondered if anyone could help (with suggestions
for good people to visit and shoot)…. I was looking for interesting
producers, pubs, orchards etc all over the country. I didn’t receive
a single reply from anyone on this group to that message and had to do
all my own research.
The key is to think of an online community as an ongoing conversation. It isn’t just a noticeboard where you can put up a post card for passers by. So you need to ease yourself in gradually, rather than with a fanfare and grand announcement. After a brief introductory post, you may receive a welcome or two, or you may be completely ignored. That’s a random and normal response so there’s no point in getting offended. A group of people is incapable collectively of being “rude” by not responding to any particular individual, and people naturally are more inclined to reply to others that they have already got to know to some extent. So don’t get downhearted in the first few days (or weeks depending on the pace) after joining a new community. Keep on joining in occasional conversations whenever you have something useful to say and after a period people will begin to notice you. Then when they do start to reply it will be as if to somebody they have already been talking to, because they have. Unfortunately though, some people just never seem to get this, and they continue to try and turn every group conversation into a 1-to-1, often appending the suggestion to reply off-list as well, which can be interpreted as somewhat selfish.
Should you expect an online community to go away and do all your research for you just because you have deigned to post a request? Most people would not have such expectations but from time to time, such is the good nature of people in general, it will actually happen, and stories about how easily online communities can be mined, picked, deployed and harvested add fuel to the reputation. As the ‘owner’ of a lively googlegroup I even get people trying to save themselves the bother of even joining, hoping I will ask their research questions for them and then pass on all the answers. If they come from a print media or broadcasting background they often demand a telephone interview, thinking that simply dropping their phone number into an email is enough to drive information and resources in their direction.
Friendfeed and Social Objects
In this second screencast video about Friendfeed, I talk about the way Friendfeed uses social object theory to add stickiness to imported feeds. There’s also a discussion of Friendfeed rooms, and a reply to Linda Hartley‘s question about the first video in this series: Friendfeed for Microblogging.
Warning: This screencast is hosted on Google video Blip.TV because I overshot the length limit of ten minutes for youTube – oops.
Social Object theory or Object Centred Sociality has been explained by Jyri Engestrom of Jaiku.
If you are trying out Friendfeed yourself, you might subscribe to mine here: Andy Roberts Friendfeed
Enterprise RSS?
I’ve clearly got a lot to learn about Enterprise 2.o. For example, what exactly is the point of standardising on one mandated brand of RSS reader software for every employee in an organisation?
In my understanding an RSS reader is a personal productivity tool, a way of organising the way a person works with their chosen reading matter. But people do not all consume information in the same way. Some like to organise everything into neat folders, others prefer to have everything in one big pile with the latest at the top. Some like to quickly scan through everything and then deal with the most important first, others prefer to work through their incoming notifications one at a time. You get the picture. There are also preferences for the style of presentation, because some people have different eyesight capabilities. For different folk, certain styles and coloured fonts work better than others or they need specific colour backgrounds to work from. Some like three panes visible at once, others a single paned window. Some work with one highly customised computer, others need to be able to log in from anywhere on a variety of machines.
So I can’t work out yet what would really be the problem facing an Enterprise IT department if people were allowed to choose for themselves which RSS reader they prefer to use. What are the benefits of standardisation, and to whom?
Blogrush phase 2 is active
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.
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
Experimental WordPress plugins deactivated
I just deactivated two experimental WordPress plugins.
- Jiglu autotag widget
- Amazon Links Pro
A brave attempt to add “intelligent” tags based on some kind of text analysis of blog content.
The tags map made a change from the usual tag cloud, and the overlay display is manageable, but the results for ‘people’ and ‘dates’ were irrelevant and the same 5 posts kept popping up for nearly all tag searches in the overlay window. To be fair, Jiglu is a very new application and probably worth another chance when it’s more mature.
Less profligate than Jiglu, the Amazon links were hit and miss, based on people’s names and phrases. No sales, but the the plugin only works with amazon.com and not amazon.co.uk.
With both of these I soon felt uncomfortable with the idea of automating the insertion of hypertext links into an article, which is after all, a piece hand crafted author written text even if it’s only a blog post. I think it clashes with the perception of the author’s voice coming through the text when the deliberate insertion of a link can happen alongside some others which are machine generated and therefore differently motivated.
This means I also have to consider very carefully the use of SH-Autolink which is a simple time saving search and replace type of hyperlink generating plugin. For that one, I need to tweak the php code so that only the first instance is hyperlinked in each post containing that string. That will be better than having to avoid using my source phrase more than once, which kind of undermines the whole point of being able to just write and let something else take care of the commonly linked phrases.
I’m now going to try and avoid temptation to test any more experimental WordPress plugins until at least after the upgrade to version 2.3 has settled down, with all the backward compatibility problems threatened by that procedure.
MyBloglog, Romlet or BlogRush?
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
Thanks for reading Andy Roberts articles about Internet on Darnet
Andy Roberts is a writer who initiated DARnet. Catch me on 
