By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Six Reasons People Aren't Commenting On Your Blog
The six reasons offered in this article are all variation on the theme "you don't encourage comments". For myself, while I encourage people to comment, my preference is always to see them express their views in their own space. The intent of this website isn't to create a 'community' around the author, it is to share knowledge and foster learning, including the development of a mature network of self-sufficient individual online resources. More...
14 février 2020
Six Reasons People Aren't Commenting On Your Blog
Blogs Celebrate 10th Anniversary
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Blogs Celebrate 10th Anniversary
Fun listen from NPR skipping through a history of blogging. I liked the effect of using echo text to indicate hyperlinks and sped-up audio to indicate scrolling. Accompanied with an essay by Any Carvin offering an Americanized (Pew study) look at blogger demographics. More...
07 février 2020
CoveritLive
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. CoveritLive
CoverItLive is a good idea indifferently executed. The idea is that the user is presented with a blog interface that allows for love blogging, live commenting, polling, and more, while an event takes place. The site not so subtly hints that people should live-blog football games (not a bad idea). But your visitors have to go in through the main site - the live blog itself is a popup with no visible URL. The completed blogs are embedded in your website with an iframe. There's a lot of text overflow, buttons that have disappeared behind the edge of screens, and the like - typical of an application that was developed quickly on Internet Explorer and not tested on different browsers with different screen and font sizes. More...
What's Happening at the Economist?
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. What's Happening at the Economist?
The Economist, notes Ken Carroll in his new blog, reports on "craze for teaching Chinese may be a misguided fad." He quite rightly takes the political journal to task. Here in Moncton, the Chinese government is launching a Confucious Institute "to promote friendly relationships with other countries and the study of Chinese language and culture." China is a permanent presence in the world. More...
Bloggers Who Write Paid Posts
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Bloggers Who Write Paid Posts
(Note: I have altered the title of this post because I don't care to post the metaphor in my own newsletter.) Karoli offers a slew of examples of mothers with kids or who are raising money for cancer who are making a little spare change off their writings. The reason? Apparently Google lowered the page rank of bloggers who write paid posts or have paid links on their blogs to zero. Me, I have no sympathy. The commercial bloggers link to each other to artificially boost their page rank. More...
The Death of Blogging Is Greatly Exaggerated
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The Death of Blogging Is Greatly Exaggerated
Last year Tony Karrer suggested that blogging may decline in 2007. And this trend has been evident since 2005. And I said it was cresting in 2004. So Ryan Bretag's suggestion that "blogs need to evolve or face a sure death of stagnation" is, if anything, stale-dated. Which is why we need posts like this from Bud Hunt to remind people that there is no 'one blogosphere', much less no 'one edublogosphere'. Blogging will continue so long as the act of blogging benefits the person doing the blogger. This may or may not involve personal transformation - you know, just having a place to write works too. More...
03 février 2020
Le Ouebe Au Service Des Routiers
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Le Ouebe Au Service Des Routiers
This is pretty neat. We can now look at live images of road conditions anywhere in New Brunswick (it's so neat when the people in government departments have a positive view of technology). This is the link to the service itself. This blog post is in French. More...
My Advice On Being A More Effective Blogger!
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. My Advice On Being A More Effective Blogger!
The advice about reading other blogs and taking part in conversations is spot on. If you think your blog is a 'publication' or a form of 'broadcasting' then it will not be very successful. I also stress the importance of having a blogging routine - I have been in meetings all day today but the day isn't done until the newsletter goes out. Because people expect, want and need consistency. The stylistic advice is generally good as well Especially the bit about publishing full feeds - partial feeds are selfish. More...
31 janvier 2020
Top 10 Reasons Why People BLOG and Don't
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Top 10 Reasons Why People BLOG and Don't
The summaries are not exactly accurate (the intent of my remark, for example, is not even close to 'because people will think you are lame') but the collection of 'reasons' culled from blog commentators is an interesting project. More...
Top 100 User-Centered Blogs
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Top 100 User-Centered Blogs
As with any of these lists, the exact content can be some matter of dispute. From my perspective, I read one or two or three items from each section, which gives me a pretty good representation from each topic area. People who want to look more deeply into usability will want more than just the sample. More...
