http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/jisc-skills-update-2007-09/
Blogs, Wikis, Podcasting
and All That
Brian Kelly
UK Web Focus Acceptable Use Policy
UKOLN Recording/broadcasting of this talk,
University of Bath taking photographs, discussing the
Bath content using email, instant messaging,
blogs, SMS, etc. is permitted providing
Email
B.Kelly@ukoln.ac.uk distractions to others is minimised.
Resources bookmarked using „skillsday2007' tag
UKOLN is supported by:
This work is licensed under a Attribution-
NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 licence
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Contents
• About The Speaker
• Blogs
• Wikis
• Podcasting
• And all that: Social Networks
• Barriers
This talk provides a summary of the various Web 2.0
technologies I am using to enable me to do my job
more effectively
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About The Speaker
Brian Kelly:
• UK Web Focus: a Web advisory post
• Involved in Web since January 1993, when he
helped set up Web service at University of Leeds
• Passionate about Web in 1993-4 (cf Gopher)
• Equally passionate about Web 2.0 today
UKOLN:
• A national centre of expertise in digital information
management
• Funded by JISC and MLA to support the higher and
further education communities and the cultural
heritage centre
• Located at the University of Bath
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Blogs
The UK Web Focus blog is now one of my
main channels for engagement with my user
communities. This blog is available at the
address ukwebfocus.wordpress.com.
The blog was very easy to set up, using the
hosted Wordpress service. On average I post
about 3 to 4 articles per week. As well as
UK Web Focus blog is
providing me with a valuable disseminationmain
now one of my
channel, the blog enables my userchannels for
engagement with my
communities to respond to my posts.
user communities.
A centre of expertise in digital information management
Uses wordpress.com
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Blogs
When you are setting up a blog it can be important to clarify its
scope (including the topics to be addressed in the blog), the target
audience and the purpose of the blog and associated best
practices for ensuring that the blog is fit for its purpose..
In my case, the blog is about the Web, including Web standards,
Web innovations and best practices.
The target audience includes Web developers, practitioners and
policy makers in the higher and further educational communities
and the cultural heritage sector.
The purposes of the blog include dissemination, getting feedback
Policies, scope, target
and engaging with my users and „thinking aloud‟.
audience & QA
processes published
Encouraging the blog readers to respond to postings helps to
shortly after launch:
ensure that the content of the blog is appropriate for the target
audience. “Dissemination,
feedback & thinking
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Blogs
In addition various usage monitoring tools can also help to ensure that
the blog is fulfilling its purpose. For example, I have used the Blotter tool
which provides a graphical display of statistics from the Technorati
service. I‟m pleased to note that the UK Web Focus blog has seen a
steady growth and, based on the Technorati statistics, is now ranked in
the top 50,000 blogs. With a total of about 70 million blogs, this places
the blog in the top 0.1%.
I have also found it useful to make comparisons with my peers – in my
case I observe how I compare with the eFoundations blog provided by
Eduserv, Scott Wilson‟s blog at CETIS and the Talis blog service.
These are some simple techniques which can be used to monitor the
effectiveness of a blog service. There is also a need to measure the
impact, and not just usage, of a blog. This is an area I intend to address
in future posts on my blog.
To conclude, I have found that the UK Web Focus blog provides a very
communities. My popularity,
effective means of engaging with my user Steady growth inonly regret is
that I didn‟t set up a blog many years ago.feedback and indications of
impact (“after reading your
blog I decided to …”)
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What Do The Readers Think?
Post inviting readers‟ comments published on
28 August 2007.
SurveyMonkey survey tool used.
Brief feedback invited on:
• Technical environment (platform, tool, …)
• Feedback on the content:
The content
Frequency of publication
Length if postings
Other comments
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Please give
your views
on the
content of
the UK Web
Focus blog.
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Please give
your views
on the
frequency of
publication
for articles
on the UK
Web Focus
blog.
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Please give
your views on
the length of
postings on the
UK Web Focus
blog.
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Feel free to give
any other
comments or
suggestions.
Conclusions
• Positive feedback
• Useful for me as is directly related to my other activities
(giving talks, writing papers, experimenting, thinking, …)
• Need to decide whether to split into multiple blogs, to better
diverse audiences
target UKOLN‟s in digital information management
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Wikis Wikis
I use blogs to document my thoughts on various issues.
In contrast I make use of wikis to enable participants at events I
organise to share their thoughts and to participate actively at
events.
I‟ve used the Wetpaint wiki (available at www.wetpaint.com) to
support quite a number of my events.
For example I used it for this year‟s Institutional Web Management
Workshop – the annual 3-day event organised by UKOLN. The
workshop participants made use of the wiki prior to the event to
make contact with fellow participants in arranging places to meet
when they arrived at the venue, on the night before the event
started. Wikis used for ~ 2
years. Main uses:
• Joint work
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• Support events
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Wikis
The wiki was also used during the various
discussion groups. A reporter for each of the
discussion groups was provided with a page
on the wiki to make notes of the discussions
which took place and any recommendations
which were made.
This had the advantage that notes weren‟t
trapped in the closed world of flipcharts. when
Remember
Instead the content could easily be reused and
notes from
shared with a wider audience. breakout groups
were trapped in
A centre of expertise in digital information management flip charts :-)
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Wikis
The wiki was also used after the event. It was
used to provide feedback on various aspects of
the workshops. In addition the wiki could be
used to upload additional content related to the
event. For example a number of videos of
talks at the workshop were taken and
subsequently made available.
As with many Web 2.0 services, the wiki
provides an RSS feed, which enables changes
Note that blogs &
wikis increasingly
made to the wiki to be easily accessed.
support additional
A centre of expertise in digital information management tools.
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Web 2.0 Repositories
For some time I‟ve been using Slideshare repository service. My PowerPoint slides are
available on the UKOLN Web site, but uploading a copy to Slideshare enables me to reach a
wider audience and to provide additional functionality at no cost to myself – such as
Slideshare‟s annotation facility and the ability to embed the slideshow in Web pages, blogs,
etc. The community aspect of Slideshare is also useful – I can see the users who ad my slides
to their list of favourites, and then see other slideshows that they like or have produced
themselves.
1047 61 3
A new feature of Slideshare is the ability to embed a sound track with the slides, which can be
synched with the slides. I‟ve done this for this talk, so that as well as attending the live
presentation or downloading the PowerPoints you can also listen to the multimedia
presentation – which can also be easily embedded into Web pages and blogs.
And this sound track can be used in a Podcast – this is an RSS file which allows an MP3 file
to be easily syndicated to MP3 players.
The software needed to do this is freely available – and I don‟t even need to install software
locally. Slideshare used for
several months:
This allows me to get my ideas and thoughts out to a much larger audience that will attend the
one-off live presentation of this talk. • Maximise
exposure and
Clearly this provides accessibility benefits, as well as minimising travel costs and my carbon
footprint. feedback
• Enhance reuse
(embed or
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A centre of expertise in digital information management download slides)
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Social Networks
I also provide access to my blog, my slides on
Slideshare and information about what I‟m
doing and my interests using the Facebook
social networking service.
This is useful as Facebook is so popular it can
help me to reach new audiences.
And it is also useful in allowing me to keep in
informal contact with my peers. (e.g. Facebook)
Social networks
provide addition dissemination
channels
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Multimedia (1)
Slideshare +
audio track =
Slidecast
Benefits:
• Accessibility
benefits
• Training aid
• …
Audio track + RSS feed = Podcast
Benefits:
• Automatic syndication
• Make in digital information management
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Multimedia Multimedia (2)
Videos can be uploaded to various services
(YouTube, Google Video, Vod:Pod, …) and
easily embedded into blogs, Web pages, etc.
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Multimedia Multimedia (3)
Video can be synched with slides and uploaded to
services such as Zentation and VCasmo (illustrated)
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Barriers What About The Barriers?
Barriers you might face in adopting such
technologies:
• Conservatism
• Reliance on third party services (“Google
might go out if business”)
• Legal issues e.g. privacy, security,
copyright, …
• Finding time
• Finding resources
• Ideology
• Technical limitations
• …
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It’s A Walled Garden
Technical limitations:
• Long, application-
specific URIs
• Changing URIs
• Content duplication
• Posts not in Google
• …
Yes, Listserv has its
limitations – but it‟s also
popular with many users
(and note email can deliver
RSS feeds, blog posts, etc.)
http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A2=ind0706&L=website-info-mgt
&T=0&F=&S=&X=40A26C40166C54F05D&Y=b.kelly%40ukoln.ac.uk&P=155
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Let’s Build A Community
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Social networks (and blogs) aren‟t for
everyone. But for many it can
provide a variety of benefits.
Do you have a Web 2.0 strategy for
your service?
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“It’s just a fashion”? Should we
be unfashionable (or elitist)?
Remember Web in 1993 and
Web-enabling e-learning and
other applications
While it‟s fashionable, we can
exploit it. After the fashion can
be the embedding
Web 2.0: let’s do it, within a
framework of:
• Exploring scenarios
• Risk assessment & risk
management
• Embracing openness
• Being user-focussed
• Building for the future (as
HE & JISC should)
• Organisational Web 2.0
strategy
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Questions
Any questions?
A two minute video summarising why I
blog and use wikis and social networks
is available on YouTube (and
embedded in various places)
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