Darren Rowse, now Problogger:

“On Sunday I preached a sermon at my local church. I used to do this weekly when I worked as a minister years ago – but it’s been a while since I had to do it (funnily enough I find it a lot more nerve wracking getting up in front of a couple of hundred people to speak than writing a post for tens of thousands!).

As I was preparing for preaching last week it struck me how similar my ‘workflow’ for it was to putting together a blog post (although a blog post is usually a lot quicker in my experience).

This video identifies some of the stages I went through last week that are similar to how I go about writing many blog posts.”

Read the transcription on Problogger. I thought this would be particularly interesting for those who are interested in #medialit.

Here is the Prezi which I am just finishing at #MediaLit.

This slideshare is four years old, but the information is still relevant.

• Entries from this blog
• Mike Thornton
• Live Blog: “The Future of Local Media” (Liz Hunter)
• Raspberry Rabbit (it’s from before the conference, but will be blog after?)

I’m expecting to come across more – let me know if you see one!

Dreams and Nightmares

In Dreams and Nightmares, I suggested that the students set up a WordPress blog to write their thoughts about their lectures, seminars, and presentations they observed from others. Due to Validation requirements, I couldn’t set this as a compulsory exercise, so I wasn’t sure if anyone would take me up on the idea, but Phil did, and you can see what is already turning into a very impressive exercise here.

Media Studies Dissertation

In talking to Helen, one of my FYP/Dissertation students, it became clear that she loves experimenting with making YouTube videos, and also wanted to conduct research into the values evident in Sainsbury’s advertising, and whether these resonated with viewers. This therefore seemed a great point at which to USE YouTube to help her conduct her research, so please do help her if you can.

BBC Click is “the BBC’s flagship technology programme’, and a really accessible watch (BBC1 Sat 06.45 & News Channel Sat 11.30, UK). Interestingly, Click’s episodes are available for 12 months, rather than the usual iPlayer 7 days, so there’s a wealth of information on there, and there is an archive of written information going back to 2004. Of course they’re on Twitter.  This week’s episode included an introductory guide to Blogging.

Current trends in digital media focus upon crowd-sourcing, collaboration and bottom-up approaches to material. A commonly used phrase is that sellers should ‘fish where the fish are’, with the trend having moved from ‘push’ marketing to ‘pull’ marketing (where users opt in). Since 2004, the ‘fish’ have largely been on social networking sites. Friends Reunited , launched in 2000, was the first social networking site to achieve prominence in the UK, but since 2004, such sites have exploded exponentially, although the emphasis is moving from quantity to quality.

Blogging consists of regular online entries, generally displayed in reverse-chronological order. No website which is interested in improving its search rankings (on Google) can afford to be without a blog. Each entry should be targeted around a keyword, consist of around 500-800 words, include an image, and offer a call to action.  Popular software includes WordPress and Blogger.

Much social media is used to provide traffic streams back to blogs and websites. The ROI (return on investment: which tends to consist of time rather than money) can be hard to quantify, but indicators such as traffic spikes and external comments can be used as measurements.

The dangers of social media are often quoted, and there are legal issues, including the dangers of harassment, cyberbullying, defamation, information leaks, misinformation and loss of intellectual property. There are concerns about security, privacy, stolen IDs, the permanency of information on the web (if you don’t want to see it on the front page of a newspaper, don’t post it). Companies are concerned about the spread of malware, time-wasting and the dilution of brand reputation. For companies using social media as push-marketing, the story is not good.

The benefits, however, are recognised by many. Regular users of social media, especially those who concentrate on one or two networks at a time, find it a great place to find others working in the field, to share and build on information, rather than multiple users reinventing the wheel. With an increased focus on authenticity, trust and relationships are built through regular interaction (one Tweet a day won’t cut it), whether that is with new external contacts, or for internal communications, and users become adept at adapting to each new system.

Twitter, created in 2006, is a form of microblogging. Initially based upon SMS messages, ‘tweets’ are limited to 140 characters, displayed and delivered to the author’s ‘followers’. A ‘retweet’ (RT) is when another user reposts your message, thus circulating it to their followers – a true compliment. Twitter is great for making and maintaining contacts with others with similar interests, with hashtags, e.g. #history, helping find these. Hashtags are especially useful for conferences, and for pulling news on a particular story. Average user age 25-54, although the celebrity culture means an increasing number of younger users.  Third party applications, especially via iPhones, expand the usability of Twitter.

Facebook, created in 2004, has changed recently changed its core user base of 18-34 year olds to 35-65 year olds. Facebook has 350 million active users worldwide, with a successful targeted paid-for advertising model, and third party applications are key. Interest groups can create Group Pages, whilst fan-pages offer more marketing potential. Facebook is typically used to maintain friendships with people already known in the ‘offline world’, making viral campaigns successful (see Ikea example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0TYy_3786bo).

MySpace in 2006 was the biggest social media site, but was overtaken by Facebook in April 2008. It collects great amounts of data about its users, so advertising is very targeted. MySpace offers customisable backgrounds, ability to upload videos and MP3s. The site is largely used by musicians, and it is claimed that artists such as Lily Allen, the Arctic Monkeys & millions of other artists been ‘discovered’ through the site.

Bebo, an acronym for “Blog early, blog often, has existed since 2005. Offering quizzes, videos, photo uploads, music, pop polls and third party applications, the site is typically used by younger users, built around school networks.

LinkedIn has the strongest reputation in the business world. Users can import their CV, link to Twitter, blogs, and Slideshare. Users can host readings lists and join groups with similar interests. LinkedIn recommends connecting only with those you really know as users can post recommendations on their connections. Companies can also create an online portfolio. Particularly good for head-hunters, job-hunters and entrepreneurs.

Ning , Chinese for peace, launched in October 2005, offers an online platform for people to create their own social networks around specific interests, whether local or global. Network pages are customisable with features, visual design and member data. Educational groups have found them great places to connect and start discussions.

Second Life is an internet-based virtual world launched June 2003. Its users create avatars for themselves, are called Residents, and interact with each other and the virtual environment, participating in individual and group activities, travel the world, undertaking tasks, and creating and trading virtual property and services with one another. Users must be over 18, although Teen Second Life is available to those aged 13+.

YouTube, created in 2005, is a video sharing website on which users can upload and share videos, and create themed playlists of favourite saved videos. In March 2008 it was estimated that it would take 412.3 years to view all YouTube content. A more professional version is Vimeo, and a Christian specific version is Tangle, which also offers other features.

Flickr, created in 2004, is an image and video hosting website, widely used by bloggers to host images that they embed in blogs and social media. Hosting over 4 billion images in October 2009, the site offers photo storage, tagging, photo-favouriting, group photo pools, and rating by level of ‘interestingness’.  Picasa is a similar site.

Google Wave, created 2009, expected to go global in 2010, is an online collaboration tool that enables groups of people to edit and discuss documents simultaneously on the web. Unlike email where messages are passed back and forth, Wave hosts a single real-time copy of a conversation that all participants can edit and add to. A confusing interface has slowed its uptake. Helpful:  http://completewaveguide.com/

Wikis tend to be used to create collaborative websites, the most famous of which is Wikipedia, created in 2001, offering 13 million articles in more than 200 languages by September 2009. Wikis do not offer static content, but actively seek to involve the visitor in an ongoing process of creation and collaboration. Changes can usually be made without review, although entries can be post-moderated, with a record kept of page changes.

Squidoo is a community-based publishing platform  on which users create “lenses”. Lenses are pages, tending to be overview articles, gathering everything a user knows about a topic of interest. Launched in 2005, Squidoo is in the top 500 most visited sites in the world.  Hubpages is similar.

Skype is a software application that allows users to make voice calls over the Internet (VOIP), whilst also allowing instant messaging, file transfer and video conferencing. Calls to other users of the service are free, while calls to other landlines and mobile phones can be made for a fee. Chats can be copied and stored elsewhere, although there’s no ability to save conversations.

SlideShare is a slide hosting service which allows users to upload, view, comment, and share slideshows and other documents. Such sites are particularly helpful in the fields of and web-conferencing, with videos, audios, animations easily contained within presentation slides. Slideshows can be embedded in blogs, and users can join interest groups. A great information source, but be aware of Intellectual Property issues.

Digg is a social news website, where users submit links and stories to share with others. Users can vote and comment on submitted links and stories. A story that is voted up is ‘digged’, a story voted down is ‘buried’. The site has come under criticism for allowing sensationalism and misinformation to thrive.

Delicious is a social bookmarking site, allowing users to tag, save, manage and share web pages from a centralized page. Tagging is the key, with each bookmark tagged with freely chosen index terms. Users can network with others interested in similar tags, and see other webpages which have been tagged under the same term, e.g. http://delicious.com/tag/socialmedia. The ‘hotlist’ on the homepage gives a taste of internet trends and memes (catchphrase or concept that spreads rapidly from person to person via the Internet). Reddit and Stumbleupon are similar sites.

Diigo allows users to highlight text and attach sticky notes to specific parts of web pages, and remain available when users return to webpages. Highlights are collected in a library, and entire sites and associated documentation can be saved for future use or downloaded for online browsing.  Items can be tagged, and can also be published as blogs, reports and slide-shows. Content is fully searchable, and users can join groups for those with similar interests.

Friendfeed is a real-time feed aggregator consolidating updates from social media and social networking websites, social bookmarking websites, blogs and micro-blogging updates, or any other RSS/ Atom feed. Friendfeed provides the facility to track activities across social media networks. A concern is that readers will comment on blog-posts within FriendFeed instead of on blogs, resulting in fewer page views for the blogger.

Many sites use a form of ‘tagging’, a form of metadata which helps describe an item and allows items to be grouped, creating a ‘folksonomy’ or collaboratively created list. Convergence is a key term, and sites such as DandyID (http://www.dandyid.org/id/drbexl) allow users to collate their digital fingerprint in one place. Increasingly social media sites are being accessed via smartphones, for which many specific applications have been developed (over 100,000 for iPhones in November 2009). There is an increased emphasis on single-sign in, leading to the development of options such as OpenID and Facebook Connect. Most of the programmes we now take for granted didn’t exist 10 years ago, so as new platforms continue to develop, there is a concern for the portability of data between different applications.

Blogging has become so popular…

It now extends far beyond the “online diary of my cat”, and into the business world. Blogging has become a great knowledgebase resource for business, both to educate the world on your products or services, and to establish your presence as an expert in your industry.

While these advantages are useful and of great benefit to every business, the SEO benefit of Blogging for your corporate website should not to be overlooked. This article will differentiate Blogs from websites and talk about how owning a Blog as well as contributing to other Blogs “Blogging” can increase your web traffic, thus lead flow and sales should also increase.

Read the full article.

Interim results, released to Times Higher Education, show that only a small proportion of those surveyed are using technology such as virtual-research environments, social bookmarking, data and text mining, wikis, blogs and RSS-feed alerts in their work. This contrasts with the fact that many respondents professed to finding technological tools valuable.”

Read full story in the Times Higher Education.

This is something I’d love to see changed. Although there is a lot of protest against the demonstrable ”impact” of research, I personally feel that research so far as possible should look to be a collaborative effort, building upon the work of others (rather than re-inventing the wheel), and disseminating that work as far as possible. Web 2.0 offers great possibilities, and I look forward to implementing a number of them at the University of Winchester.

JISC E-Learning Fair
My iPhone was still awaiting repair/replacement, and as there was a £15 fee to use the wireless, I decided I’d stick with pen and paper, but when it then took quite some time to sort through the information and reproduce a blog, I’m thinking a Netbook may be the way forward other events. As I only have 7.5 hours a week to work on Blended Learning (although I invariably do more), got to conserve the time for working on new ideas, although clearly the dissemination of such information is important!

Why I Study History
PowerPoint was banned at this session, which was intended to be as responsive as possible, but I did write a few notes, and not too long after the event adapted those notes to integrate some of the discussion we’d had afterwards, and posted onto my WW2 Poster blog..

Men at War/Framing Film
Again, at these conferences I was armed only with a notebook. Neither conference was set up for Twitter, so it wasn’t a question there. In giving my paper, I had access to a presentation remote control, and this makes such a difference to presentation – allowing more flexibility, and more engagement with the audience. As to blogging however, I’d blogged BEFORE each conference, which generated a lot of interest (judging by my hit counter), bit I still haven’t got round to putting elements of my paper online, even though I could easily upload  the PowerPoints to Slideshare, and maybe even just cut and paste my notes (yes, I did use PPT, but I didn’t have a fixed script).

Greenbelt
Attended Greenbelt after the previous couple of events. I’d maintained contact with a number of people from those events via Twitter, Facebook, blog comments, etc., and it was a great chance to meet up with a number of people face-to-face again, and to have a clearer idea of which elements of the event to attend. Greenbelt experimented with an iPhone app for the first time, with around 300-400 users paying around £4 each (rather than £8 for a paper programme), in which you could favourite particular sessions. Only drawback with this was that the battery kept running out, and keeping it charged was either expensive (there was a place to recharge phones) or time-consuming in trying to find a plug socket not in use by someone else/combined with a session you’re interested in! So all my notes, again, were on paper, although I did send out a number of Twitpics from the event (don’t do this overseas, I tried a few from Twitterfon/Echofon, and it downloaded all my tweets as well – my bill for a couple of weeks abroad was about £200!)

Christianity in the Digital Space
At “Christianity in the Digital Space“, I came armed with… a notebook and my iPhone for the first session! Everyone else was hunkered down behind their laptops, and my phone, under the strain of so much Twittering, ran out of battery before the morning was up! After lunch, therefore, I returned with my laptop/partially charged iPhone, and joined the general melee for a power socket! We talked about the experience of constantly Tweeting (and other online interactions) whilst someone was giving a paper. Most presenters were quite happy with this, as they were the ones Tweeting when not presenting (even I didn’t manage both!), and the exceptionally brave ones kept an eye on the Twitterfall, and interacted with it.

Churches Media Council Conference
Once I overcame logging into the wireless network (there was no phone signal really to speak of), I had a great time Twittering about the event, along with a number of others, and having mini-tweet-ups, including meeting those I’d met before the event in person (always great – see, that’s why I talk BLENDED, not E-LEARNING). The event is quite rammed, and unlike many, I didn’t have a netbook, so tried to blog in the evening, but only managed a short entry on the first evening (trying to get agreement on a hashtag, and promoting the use of a Twitterfall – not quite this year, but it’ll be there next year), whilst it took a bit longer for the second entry, which was more of an overview of an event, and links across to others who had participated at the event.