Seth Keen

Inger Mewburn came and did a lecture in networked media on blogging earlier in the semester. I have been meaning to blog some notes from the presentation. There was many good points but here is a few that are relevant to this blog and networking online.

It was interesting here about how the Thesis Whisperer blog had been networked out there into relevant communities using twitter. Bringing up the idea of integrating services to promote a blog and using those services relevant to their affordances. Mewburn described twitter practice as being similar to DJing. Putting out the latest stuff people want to hear and then throwing in your mixing style. (I need to get to grips with DJ practice more to fully grasp this analogy) But, the long and short of it is using twitter to tap into communities discussing/researching a similar area then jumping into that discussion and pulling people across to your own research – blog etc.

While facebook for example was described as being kept ‘light’ – used for different purposes.

Blog writing it was suggested is writing like you talk and you need to put yourself into the writing ‘every so often’…’speak it out aloud’ to as a test…

Another idea that came up was the dinner party concept from (Kamler and Thompson 2006) Seeing yourself as being at a dinner party which has selected guests (like the Q&A show on ABC), who represent a number of different perspectives/sides on a topic. The conversation has some bite but there is also an understood politeness. This analogy was used to think about developing a confidence to talk about ideas and not be ‘terrorised’ by the big hitting theorists. The conversational style is personal but in certain company discussing politics for example you want your ideas (pov) to be taken (reasonably) seriously. The dinner party sets up a situation to discuss something from multiple perspectives in a manner that sits between the informal-formal boundaries. Gets away from the rigid style of the traditional academic approach. ( I do need to find the original source in the book mentioned to get the full grasp of this concept).

Googled it p. 37 Your own writing is the food on the table that your invited guests ‘eat, chew, digest’, the dinner is in your home organised by you – the selected guests are conversing about their ideas/concepts/theories in relation to your own inquiry.

Finally, editing was the other point made working from the book Writing to Learn , by William Zinsser. A editing technique which is used to get rid of the ‘fuzz’. Putting brackets around material to be removed and drawing a comparsion between for example the original paragraph and the edited version.

Another couple of notes Mewburn uses morguefile to have copyright free images working with text in blog entries. (something I neglect in the pace of existence) A blog entry is often ended with a question to prompt readers to comment.

Kamler, B & Thomson, P 2006, Helping doctoral students write pedagogies for supervision, Taylor & Francis Ltd, Hoboken.

Seesmic is a recent sharing platform that has been developed around using online video for commenting. Background on wikipedia including the person behind this venture. It has been seen as a version of twitter video and is directed towards webcams. A flash interface is being used with a MySQL database.

1.Set up a blog for reblogging using the http://media.rmit.edu.au/ address i.e. mog
2. Free download NetNewsWire a desktop RSS and ATOM reader.
3. To make it an easier process purchase a copy of ecto a desktop blogging client.
4. In the preferences of NetNewsWire choose to publish to ecto directly.
5. Add the RSS feeds from each of the students blogs in a designated folder in NetNewsWire.
6. Set up a direct publication to the reblog/blog that you are going to use in ecto.
7. Sort through the incoming feeds and choose what you want to reblog – add a category and tag in ecto.

Technorati Tags: teaching

Chris let me know recently about a online documentary that he made titled ‘Thumb Candy’ on SMS text culture in the Philipphines that he put together within a blog. He gives Videodefunct a plug on the More about the project page as being an influence on using tagging and a blog to classify the video content.

I attended Melbourne wordcamp and caught a couple of presentations. Christine Davis the producer of the ultimate tag warrior did a presentation titles ‘Tags, Categories, Taxonomies, Folksonomies, Oh My!’. Tags where a hot topic of discussion with James Farmer pointing out that wordpress had been slow to include tags as part of the WP CMS until very recently. A key point of discussion was the difference between categories and tags. Apparently, there is a plug-in that convert categories to tags and back the other way on the premise there is no difference. Christine mentioned machine tags introduced by Flickr. From wikipedia:

They comprise three parts, a namespace, a predicate and a value.

Another reference machinetags.org There is also a connection here she suggested with Microformats. Categories where seen as being hierarchal grouping posts of similarity in a group and are more structured, used for organising content. Tags on the other hand more free form used to “determine the way things differ”. A comment in the audience suggested categories are chapters and tags the index. Davis’ response to which to uses suggested using both. Yahoo provide sites/services that recommend what tags to use like zonetag for example.

A Vienna media group CONT3XT.NET contacted me to see about putting an rss feed from net-video in their sidebar. They are getting up a project called MOVING.IMG About:

CONT3XT.NET is a Vienna-based organisation founded in 2006 as a collaborative platform for the discussion and presentation of issues related to Media Art. Against the background of an interdisciplinary theoretical approach to all forms of communications technologies its mission is the critical investigation and documentation of actual tendencies in contemporary art production.

On this site they include a post on videodefunct.

I keep leaving the archive backup for long periods and of course I forget the procedure so this is a note to come back to. WordPress backups on the codex. The step-by-step instructions. First up transfer the server blog folder to my desktop then onto the external. Next the archives accessed mySQL through phpMyAdmin. In there choose databases and the blog I am backing up. Check export. Follow screenshots on WP codex.

Another video download from Beyond Broadcast 2006 Reinventing Public Media in a Participatory Culture. The panel session ‘The future of digital community.’ The first speaker Brendan Greeley talking about radio open source.… about:

Open Source is a conversation, four times a week on the radio and any time you like on the blog. We designed the show to invert the traditional relationship between broadcast and the web: we aren’t a public radio show with a web community, we’re a web community that produces a daily hour of radio.

Orginally kicked off with a message board in the 90s the show has moved to a blog. The blog comes first in the process of bringing people to the radio show. The presentation questions how you filter or make sense of the scale of information available on the Internet and make that applicable to a public radio platform. They chose a blog and suggest that blogs are a version of “talk radio.” They favoured the structure of a blog because they could guide the discussion and include participants contributions in that process. The show is therefore structured like a blog. To promote traffic; conversation; interaction; community with people (i.e. getting others linking to their blog) they follow a process where they examine a person’s blog carefully then email them questions asking them for opinions and ideas on specific topics. I found this interesting in terms of promoting more substantial types of content in the broader blogosphere. The approach involves time, focus and analysis with the content on a specific blog. Overall the radio open source system relies on open access for the listeners to engage. As they describe:

we rely on our listeners and readers…“the people formerly known as your audience” to help us produce the show. At its most basic, we look for this production help in the comment threads of this website. Every time we have an idea for an hour of radio we post it to the site. That show may not go on the radio for another month, but we immediately start reading comments — suggestions for guests, questions for guests, suggestions for ways to frame the show or reading material — and following up on them.

Beyond Broadcast 2006‘Reinventing Public Media in a Participatory Culture’. The panel session ‘The future of digital community.’ Speaker Tom Geraco gather.com How do you work with user created content in public media on the Internet? He states that the issue in the blogosphere is that “good content is hard to find because it is lost in a sea of mediocrity” and a blog generally is still a “one-way form of media”. On the gather.com site the “users gather the content, edit the content through raters and evaluation…our users recruit their own readers…to expand their own audience…”, and create topics of interest. The presentation seemed too much like a hard sell for their own web site but there is some useful information in terms of developing frameworks for public participatory media.

Tom Worthington notes on Stephen Mayne’s (Crikey.com founder), talk on journalism and the role blogs could play in media.

Stephen argues that Web 2.0 user generated content is not new. Letters to the editor and talkback radio are old forms of user generated journalism. Unfiltered anonymous online forums quickly generate into a mess. Bloggers don’t break many major public stories. Due to compulsory voting, independent bloggers are unlikely to influence elections. The bloggers need a partnership with the conventional media to reach a mass market. Bloggs can also continue a public debate, in the place of declining public forums.