Elwyn Jenkins: Blogging

Wed, 05 Mar 2003 22:58:22 GMT

Google Village

has changed its name to become

Microdoc News

We have taken this step to aid Google Inc., in protecting its trademark "Google™". We have not been asked by Google Inc., to do this. We are taking our own steps to effect this change.

You will be automatically redirected to the new site. If this does not occur, click on the link above.

Online Advertising Has Lost the Plot . . . Corporates in the Know Blog!

Thu, 09 Jan 2003 19:24:28 GMT

Most corporates have lost the plot on the Internet. As Meryl.Net Articles points out:

Most agree that online advertising has failed. The people who have done offline advertising are applying the same rules and concepts when creating online advertising. The first rule that online experts learn: writing for the Internet is not like print journalism. The second rule: you can have all the whiz-bang graphics and flash you want, but words make the sale. Words load faster than graphics-laden Web pages.

But wait! How do people arrive at Web sites? Sure, some of the biggies like Amazon and eBay need not worry about search engines as they’ve established themselves with online presence that everyone knows. Small businesses and lesser known companies have to rely on search engines to lead the troops to their sites. Email newsletters are another way to reach people, but how do they find out about the newsletter in the first place? Unless it’s a referral, it’s most likely through the Web site.

Some corporates have found a high-content answer that really gets readers and builds relationships -- Blogging. Just look at Ray Ozzie's Weblog from Groove. The Corporate site is necessary and provides informaton about the company. But it is Ray Ozzie's site that build a relationship with customers, uses the FreshBot principle of getting new stuff in Search Engines on a daily basis. Ray Ozzie has more than 2,000 people come to his weblog door a day. Through weblogs, Ray Ozzie is building fresh content daily, building a conversational style with his readers and has real opportunity to talk about his software products and concerns surrounding them. Beats SPAM anyday!!

Goodbye flashy advertising, wizbang gadoodles that littler my email box each day. I do not mind if Corporate put wizbang gadoodles on their website -- then we have a choice whether or not to view it. Content, relationships, networks, links and carrying the conversation and knowledge building on is the core of the web. Those who are really up with the develoment of the web know this and are blogging. Those who are less Technate, continue to SPAM us all and cause us all a garbage destruction problem.

Getting Your Way Around the World of Blogs . . .

Thu, 09 Jan 2003 06:12:23 GMT

An excellent list of Blog Directories.

The Pepys Project is a great worldwide directory of Blogs. Great to have someone build a project and use some historical meaning as a point of jumping into the project. We can learn much from studying the way people who were new to literacy went about to create their world. There are ways we can apply the past to the future. We may gain some greater insights into literacy through applying those concepts to the world of Technacy. You do not know who Pepys is? You can learn more on the site but here is a brief:

Samuel Pepys was born in in London, England on 23 February 1633. He was well-educated, earned a degree in 1654 and though intending to become a lawyer, upon the execution of Charles I moved into another field. He worked in various capacities in government under the Protectorate. In June 1660 he was appointed Clerk of the Acts to the Navy Board, in the government departments overseeing the royal dockyards.

Also in 1660, at 27, Pepys began his diary and recorded in it until he was 36, when fear of losing his eye-sight compelled him to stop.

Samuel Pepys' diary is famous, and historically valuable, because of Pepys' eye for detail and unerring recounting of events both magnificant and mundane; from the Plague in 1665 to the Great Fire in 1666, to the coronation of Charles II; from where he ate, with whom and at what time he returned home; from chastising household help, to walloping his wife while they slept, Pepys' account of his world offers an incredible glimpse into the daily life of someone who lived 340 years ago.

In my opinion, you can learn more about day-to-day life in post-Cromwellian times reading Pepys' vivid entries, than you could from a dozen strightforward history texts.

After completing his last entry in the diary, Samuel Pepys lived another 34 years. In that time, he became Secretary to the Admiralty (1673), and then became a Member of Parliament (also 1673). From that point, Pepys continued to have a distinguished career in the Navy offices, about which you can learn more at The Samuel Pepys Library site.

Weblogs: Center of Online Knowledge Building

Tue, 07 Jan 2003 14:54:45 GMT

Evidence is pointing towards the fact that weblogs is where key knowledge is being built. Because of the wealth of knowledge contained in "blogs" I now perform searches quite differently. First, I search specifically only in "weblogs" using the Google tool I put on this site. Then, after I have gleaned the wisdom from weblog pages, I use what I have learnt from weblogs to shape a set of words (often up to six or seven words) so that I get highly useful search results from Google.

It is also surprising to see how many times the first three to five results in Google are actually weblogs -- often some I did not come across in my earlier and less specific weblogs searches. Usually, by using this method of first going to weblogs to refine my ideas and then to Google with a more specific search, I will get a list of no more than 35 to 40 sites to visit, all of extremely high relevance to what I am needing.

Our Google Masters have recognized that weblogs have good quality, fresh material. My site at Google Village gets crawled by GoogleBot every second day. Google indicates that they collect "Google also unveiled several new enhancements that make available the latest news, refreshed daily web content. . ." The emphasis of this Bot is to search weblogs that are updated on a daily basis. GoogleBot that comes around every second day or so, collects specifically from weblogs. [See what the forums where the Google Tech Guys hand around are saying about this. Specifically FreshBot comes almost exclusively to weblogs.]

Even publishers are recognizing the value of many thousands of people journaling or blogging each day. Publishers are now scanning weblogs to see what they can find to publish. [See: Blog Novelist Gets Contract]. I have had publishers discussing various matters with me, including seeking as to whether I would expand on a particular article I wrote.

There is a danger of, what I call, falling into a hole. If a blogger simply focuses on what other people are saying and simply point to other links, eventually there is little to link to as it has been all linked into itself. Rather, as the novelist does above who wrote original material and serialized it online, I like to think of blogging being a cross between my editorial and saying something useful beyond what other people have said -- essentially carrying the conversation on to another point or another level.

Now if everyone carries the conversation on from where the other person left it off, and/or if there are genuine linkages between ideas that did not really exist before, or we are now making existing links stronger, there is a genuine development of real knowledge in this setting. Learning how to carry a conversation, in my weblogs, and refer to other, so that the conversation carries on from where it is now, and from where I am now, is part of what I call the Skills of Technacy.

Weblogging and Personal Publishing

Tue, 31 Dec 2002 21:26:05 GMT

How useful are weblogs for sharing knowledge? "BlogStreet is hosting Sébastien Paquet's survey on the usefulness of weblogs and wikis for sharing knowledge. Please go here to fill in the short multiple-choice questionnaires." [The FuzzyBlog!] I for one would be interested in the outcome of this survey.

Tutorial on using Radio Userland to build weblogs. For those who are new to weblogging and want to know how it is done, this is a great introduction.

Understanding Weblogs. You read 'em all the time, but what makes a weblog a weblog? And how can you quickly jump in and start publishing your own? Wei Meng Lee shows you the blogging ropes. [O'Reilly Network Articles] [Richard Gayle]

Personal Knowledge Publishing. If you have done Sébastien Paquet's survey, you might also want to read about his article "Personal Knowledge Publishing and its uses in research." In his conclusion, Seb echoes some of my own thoughts regarding the use of weblogs for Personal Publishing. For me, weblogs is about personal publishing -- which is used to:

test concepts
identify potential areas where my thinking can be useful to others
identify potential published products
provide me with a way to release my work to readers who eventually will pay.

See my other note on this I wrote earlier today.

The World of Microcontent

Thu, 26 Dec 2002 04:51:12 GMT

Now that is a useful word 'microcontent'. This word refers to the management systems of personal contents online including: weblogs, webzines, email digests, and personal publishing. A great site outlining the concept is found at Microcontent News.

The importance of Microcontent is that it provides a voting system for Macrocontent. Thousands of pointers stemming from Micrcontent on the web provides a system for elevating the stories that are on larger sites.

While I may point to Microcontent news here, and several other people do the same in combination because we provided a pointer there we are voting the importance of the site. Mention the same site in an email that is then posted onto a mail digest site, and then we also have small websites that point there as well, we are providing a way for crawlers from Google or other Directory site to find and then index that site.