Radio Education
I hope none of this gets duplicate posted because I have been having Microsoft problems ... I push Post or Publish button and it is like I lost everything and Windoze says something about trouble accessing that page.
Warning: This is another rather long post by Al Macintyre, with an abundance of interrelated nuances. It has to do with referrers and perceptions and more connections, and how we hopefully can figure out what is going on. Al is at a stage of learning Radio, with an occasional Eureka! when something clicks in Al's mind, but still a lot of Duh factor as to why some things work the way they do.
Referers are a list of places that have linked to our weblog in the last 24 hours, supposedly (more on my aside, doubting this simplistic assertion, later). I think what happens is that someone posts something on their web site that is a link to us, but that does not show up on the Referers until someone actually uses the link.
- I post something on day 1.
- On day 2 person 2 sees my post, finds it interesting, publishes something on their site about it, with link to my weblog giving credit.
- That link is not to my actual post, but to my weblog.
- On day 3 person 3 sees the stuff on person 2 site, follows the link to my weblog.
- That causes a hit on my referers, identifying person 2 site for the first time for me.
- Person 3 is not identified by this process.
- The referer points me to person 2 site, not to the actual post, so I am scrolling around the site looking for it.
- Persons 4 5 6, also not identified, mean additional hits, all identifying person 2 site as to what connected to me.
- I have a Radio Wish that the Referers and News Aggregation reposts did a better job of linking back directly to the actual item post, not just to the general site.
Because our referers only show the last 24 hours worth of stuff and are cleared in the middle of the night, I have been trying to visit them each evening, cut paste what is there to my Referer Archives collection to see what is new connection to me that I might want to explore. I am making a Radio Tip here that other people might want to do something similar. I believe there are some tools out there to simplify the process, but I want to understand what is going on before I complicate my situation with some Tool.
It is not clear to me exactly when the Referers get cleared ... is it Midnite USA Eastern Time? Is it same time every nite, or when the servers get a round TUIT with other duties? Where exactly are the referers stored ... on some Userland or Weblogger site? I notice Userland has a Yesterday link that might be a nice tool, if the data is available from the server right before they wipe out the latest story. That is more a Radio Question than anything else.
I am finding a lot of strange stuff on my Referers that I am having a hard time figuring out.
Someone had done a Google search asking about some topic of posting stories on our Radio Weblogs (specifically Radio express copy text from browser to weblog). I had done a post some time ago about how something works, and pointed at a Radio Userland site as having many of the answers how to do that. The Google search showed me giving the answers. But the answers text not actually on my site, it is on the Radio site that my text linked to. Someone looking at this kind of information could very easily be led to the conclusion that I said something that was actually said on some other site that I linked to.
Saturday Sep 7, I commented on a news story at Atlantic Monthly, giving link to the story, an interview with Rick Cook about his book on Anti Gravity. Then I find in my Referers the Atlantic story refering to me. Well I am nowhere in that article. I linked to them, why are referers saying they are linking to me? My working theory is that someone on one of the Atlantic forums made some remarks about me comparing Rick Cook book to stuff on UFOs, Pyramid Power, and Mad Science, and the Referer software has some bugs in it.
We say something. Someone else thinks it is interesting and comments on it. Unless we are very careful, it is not clear to a third party who said what. Then a third party is asking me to clarify something they thought I wrote. I try to clarify who is doing what, but the way the software works, that muddies the trail.
Radio Suggestion: When quoting someone, and then commenting on what they said, be very careful to make clear who is saying what in the quotes. Look at what I have recently done on my web site, with QUOTE before and UNQUOTE after, with both of them adjacent to who I am quoting. I know it gets complicated when a story has multiple quotes from multiple people, I just saying we all need to strive to improve the state of our writing so that we minimize risks of misleading other people as to who originally said what.
I share this because I am recently in a struggle with someone who is asking me why I did something, and I think it is very easy to misread what is going on in the Radio Weblog world. The documentation says one thing, the software works subtly differently, there may be bugs, the software may have been enhanced since the documentation was written.
Radio Suggestion: When writing documentation, state that this is for Radio version 8.0.7 or whatever, so when someone is trying to correlate what we see with what the documentation says, the version that the documentation is for or about can help us reconcile the differences. In time we might be able to use Search Engines to find who has documented a particular topic for range of versions where we reasonably sure that topic not changed in a while. Likewise the people who have done documentation can then see that something changed at version 8.1.3 say, and search for everything they have written on that prior to that version change, then adjust their text to be up to date, and change their version reference accordingly.
Before anyone else has a misunderstanding about me, let me try to clearly state that I am a Radio Customer struggling to figure out this stuff, in which I learn a lot by bouncing stuff off other people who seem to be in a similar learning curve boat. I do have some past computer experience which technically it is rather alien to the Radio reality.
However, what is parallel is the user experience. We see something weird happening. We speculate what is going wrong. We call the help desk to complain, not about the weird details, but we pass our speculation on. Well our speculation might be totally off base. The help desk has to figure out what is really going on, and our speculation tends to lead them astray. Then there is the need to figure out what the end user really needs.
Lawrence Lee of the Radio Discussion is to be commended for his skills, talent, and diplomacy at rapidly cutting through user confusion to provide a translation of what is needed to solve our problems.
I think I am emerging from the beginner newbie stage of many aspects of this, but there are some areas where my knowledge is pretty low. There is high risk that I will state something incorrectly because of where I am on learning about this. I have had some very serious misconceptions along the way. If someone asks me a question, I try to help them. I learn a lot from the Radio Discussion and try to give back to the community.
There is stuff that can't be learned by reading the documentation, which assumes the reader knows a lot, that many readers do not in fact know.
Open Suggestion: The user community needs to develop and access better standards for Radio documentation. We might learn from Academia, Journalism, Past Big Company Computer Products, general books and magazines on PCs like www.smartcomputing.com and I am sure other people can suggest other places to use as models to emulate.
We have to do things, then watch see what happens and try to figure out from there. Thanks to my Radio Doc Sources, I have made connections that I could not have made without them.
For someone to be participating in dws.Radio.FAQ, then showing up on Al referers because they have linked to Al's Radio Doc Sources, which were announced through Radio Discussion and dws.Radio.FAQ and people subscribing to this stuff, such users have to be a bit beyond the beginner stages, because to make this work, they have to be skilled in:
For someone to learn this, that implies a certain level of experience figuring out how to work Radio. I think there are two types of skills or talents that need to be combined. There is the geeky stuff related to figuring out how to work the software. There are the communication skills associated with giving proper credit to where we got something. These skills are often found in different people, not often in the same person.
Thus, if someone's web site links to me, I assume that person is not a beginner. They may have other stuff that I can learn from. If I had not posted stuff on my weblog that they found to be interesting enough to link to from their site, I would never have learned about the useful stuff they have that I can learn from. Thus, my Radio Doc Sources are like an introduction that leads me to cool stuff, some of which is relevant to making additional updates like these latest additions.
Matt Mower
- Live Topics tool enhances Radio Knowledge Management.
- If I am understanding this correctly, we get some macros added to the Radio collection, which lets us assign topics or subjects to our posts, existing ones and any new ones. We can then get a table of contents that links to what we have done on the subjects we have assigned.
Thomas Burg
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His weblog, which is in a mixture of English and German, has some links on the right side. Go down to section headed Relevant and open up the Outline on Radio then Tools. He has links to over 20 tools there that you could use to enhance your Radio experience. Lots more stuff to explore as our time permits.
This stuff to my Radio Doc Sources might not yet have upstreamed. I notice different things (Categories, Home, Stories) tend to upstream on different schedules. For example, I posted my stuff on the Rick Cook book to my category History of Technology and also to Science Fiction interests, at the same time, but there was over 24 hour lag between the two publishings reaching my public site.
12:12:01 AM 
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