By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Blogs As PLEs
I was asked in a recent comment what I thought the best PLE software was (this following my comments about Ecto). I was going going to say it hasn't been built yet, and to a certain degree this is true. But if I had to point someone to something that actually does exist, I'd probably say WordPress, with any number of the plug-ins. Why? Well as this post notes, in most VLEs information is "caged in". But a system like WordPress really allows you to get content in and out fairly efficiently. That's most of what we want from a PLE. But see also Tony Hirst on PLE as platform touting the Benefits of Facebook and Zoho Notes (which I also discussed recently). If I could have my own private versions of those (on that, see Steve O'Hear on Facebook as platform) - and not be forced to rely on their benevolent hosting - they would also be strong candidates. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Seth Godin: Why Liveblogging has Little to Do with the Reader
The proposition is that live-blogging (that is, blogging about an event during an event) is not particularly useful, because the results aren;t very good. "most people don't take notes to be read. They take notes to write them. The act of writing things down triggers different areas of our brain, it focuses attention, it makes it easier to remember things." Well, maybe. But there's no reason a person cannot liveblog well - which is to say, satisfy both purposes. It is possible to compose readable prose on the fly - if you learn how to write well enough. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Measuring Your Blog'S Outcomes and Use of Other Social Media Tools
Discussion of the idea of evaluating the effectiveness of blogs, and in particular, a set of metrics from Avinesh Kaushik:

• "Raw Author Contribution (posts and words in post)
• Unique Blog Readers (content consumption - Unique Visitors and Feed Subscribers)
• Conversation Rate (measuring success in a social medium)
• Technorati "Authority" (measuring your impact on the world!)
• Cost (what!)
• Return on Investment (what's in it for you/your business)"

Would this newsletter be twice as good if I wrote twice as many posts or wroite them twice as long? If I wrote about a more popular topic - educational policy, say - I would have more readers. Would that be better? Is Will Richardson better than me because he gets more comments? Am I better than you because I have a higher Technorati rank? Would it be better if I made money and spent less on my website?

Measuring "your blog's outcome" is ridiculous. It's like measuring 'friendship'. measuring 'reflective moments'. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The Illogical Rhetoric of Share Alike
I don't agree with this post. I use 'share-alike' on my licenses (both Creative Commons and Open Source Software (where it's GPL) precisely because I don't want somebody coming along, doing a minor repurpose, and then claiming to 'own' the content. Leigh Blackall argues against 'share alike', though, because he can't use SA content in conjunction with proprietary materials, cultually restructed materials, or old commercial materials. Right. because such a combining would be a process of taking something that is freely sharable, and turning it into something that is not. It's just a clever way of raiding the commons for personal gain. But that said - there is nothing that presents the presentation of SA materials alongside commercial materials. You an still use the materials - you just can't pretend they are something you have created (and can restrict access to). More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. 12 Important U.S. Laws Every Blogger Needs to Know
This post may be based on U.S. law, but the result is a good set of guidelines that constitute common sense in any jurisdiction. For example, "Never claim that you are an objective, unbiased source if you are being paid to provide information." Or "Always clearly distinguish between your work and someone else's." And this seems to be pretty obvious by now: "Never allow criminal comments or stolen content to remain on one of your sites." And for the commercial sites out there, "Never share or sell sensitive information such as social security numbers, credit card numbers, bank account information, criminal background or health records". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Blog Growth Stalling: Some Reasons Why I Nearly Quit Blogging
According to Technorati, the growth of the blogosphere has stalled at about 14 million active blogs. People still start blogging, then quit. This post offers some reasons why. I would add a generalized category of 'retribution' to the list. This is what you get if you use your real name. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Radical Trust: The State of the Museum Blogosphere
This article actually has very little to say about 'radical trust' but instead looks at a survey of museum blogs (the number of which has doubled since the beginning of 2006) and goes on to say "Museum blogging is maturing and is becoming an accepted (and unfunded!) communication platform." Some nice links in the references. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Science Commons News: Copyright and Fair Use in the Blogosphere
Documentation of a recent flap in which a publisher sued someone for using a figure copied from a published research paper. After the blogosphere made a fuss the publisher relented - but for that particular instance only. The author asks "in the world of blogging where cutting and pasting is common practice, how do copyright and fair use laws apply." But the better response is to observe that "this is exactly the kind of situation that the open access movement is trying to address". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Reflections On Media in Transition 5
Blog post that will be used as a central location for coverage of the Media in Transition conference that took place this past weekend. Already the post has links to audio from the conference (which makes it worth linking to - but with files like this - "MIT 5: Folk Cultures and Digital Cultures - recorded Apr. 27, 2007 - (1hr51min / 102.4MB)" - it seems apparent that the organizers should reduce the bit rate to produce manageable file sizes - a two hour file shouldn't be much over 20 megabytes. More...