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.
Now I am outside the rmit infrastructure time to look at back-up for my blog. First stop the WP codex The ‘backing up your database page’ is the one. In here the restoring process also covered.
First up, if you are into tags looks like in the top 100 on technorati weblog or weblogs is used more than blogs or blogging. So, maybe I might think about renaming the category for blogging to weblog here on this blog. All part of thinking about what is going on out there with the way tags are generated and how this form of taxonomy is cultivated.
But, what this post is really about is me stalling on how to pitch this new blog. I have momentary writers block as I ponder what and how I would like to write on what will hopefully be an ongoing blog (that doesn’t keep moving for a bit.) And of course the best way to kill writers block is to start writing.
So, what is happening here? Well a few influences are creeping in as my hands are poised over the keyboard. Funnily enough, one of them is about writing more vane, banal crap that adds to the information overload on the web. A recent essay on blogging by Geert Lovink titled ‘Blogging, the nihilist impulse’ provides a critique on the blogging phenomenon, with a particular focus on the potential that blogging has as an independent form of media. And this is where the writing slows down and my point is illustrated in the practice. Right now I am working super-fast to incapsulate what is a complex argument. I have read this article a few times, but in what I call true blogging fashion, I am skimming looking for a quick way to summarise to suit my needs in what should be typically a blog post that doesn’t ideally turn into a book. The other typical way of doing that is grabbing a quote out like this:
Blogging is neither a project nor a proposal but a condition whose existence one must recognize. “We blog,” as Kline and Bernstein say. It’s today’s a priori. Australian cultural theorist Justin Clemens explains: “Nihilism is not just another epoch amongst a succession of others: it is the finally accomplished form of a disaster that happened a long time ago.”[22] To translate this into new-media terms: blogs are witnessing and documenting the diminishing power of mainstream media, but they have consciously not replaced its ideology with an alternative. Users are tired of top-down communication – and yet have nowhere else to go. “There is no other world” could be read as a response to the anti-globalization slogan, “Another world is possible”.
That gets the point across without me working hard on the paraphrase and leaves it at that, time to move onto the next post. And, this is where the title for this post begins to change as I begin to realise what the focus on this post might be about. Yes, questioning and finding an alternative approach, somewhere I haven’t already been or maybe what you call reflecting on what has gone before. Looking up the screen the length of this post is catching up on me it is time to close and think about another post as a way to capture other aspects of what I am looking for here. A good place to start would be my own critique of the article referred to above. Perhaps, this critique in itself may be part of the other ‘world’ that Lovink is referring to?