Clowning Around?

I’ve hardly blogged at all recently (been on twitter lots) - There’s a debate raging about whether twitter kills blogging. We’ve been having the debate using cloudworks which is our very nice home grown system and I intend to give my opinions of that in another post, but suffice to say I love it.

…anyhow back to my point. By far the most traffic to my blog was generated from my post about Why Clowns are Dangerous. This has in fact also spawned a lot of quite vitriolic and IMHO (!) self opinionated comments, these tend to be light on research and factual evidence but heavily packed with personal insults.

From this I summise:-

1. Michael Wesch is spot on in his analysis about behaviours around anonymity and rage. Particularly people  think they know me from what is a very incomplete set of criteria by which to judge….and for the record my sister runs a circus troupe and regularly dresses in a clown costume. There is a recognised condition around clowns and their fear. Stephen Kings “IT” is directly playing on that association.

2. Clowns are not something to make fun of. Clowns take themselves very seriously.

3. My sister runs a circus troupe (performing arts and trapeze and the works) so there is a clown in my family

4. The more bizarre the blog post the more traffic it generates. My second most popular post is on silent vacuum cleaners. Therefore ridding the world of scary clowns and noisy vacuum cleaners is likely to make someone very popular.

5. Most people don’t get irony. Or humour. Going back to 1, this is probably to do with the other 55% non verbal communication. Or it could be that people only expect blogs to be ‘either’ comical or serious and not a mixture.

6. People make assumptions. All the time. We forget past things that don’t fit those assumptions and concentrate on the latest things that do. Derren Brown would have a field day. Or am I making assumptions?

Plurk and Twitter

I’m plurking a bit now (is that the correct adjective?) and Twittering (or tweeting?) a bit more but my twitter use is sporadic. I’m finding that I need reason to do both and I found that reason most recently when I went over to Ireland. The wait in the airport was a great opportunity to network and I really enjoyed the ‘conversation’. I have to say that I don’t use them much at work except to track other peoples movements. It is also possible that I’m not getting the most from Twitter because I’m spending a lot of time in meetings which are not twitterable (too boring or confidential) and also not the type that I can lose concentration on (lest I get roped into doing something).

I also find I twitter about stuff like strangling my cat (not literally but metaphorically although I had to scrape up mice innards and cat sick from the patio this morning so I wasn’t far off the literal!) and I sometimes feel like being in a pub and suddenly finding my boss has turned up and is listening in to my rant. People express the same view about the new open plan building that we’re moving in to. They say that they forget they’re in open space and someone calls up about something like booking a holiday and they go into intimate detail forgetting that they’re being overheard by half the department.

I will try harder though as I think I’ve nearly reached the point where I could get addicted to twitter given the right set of circumstances. In my case being stranded somewhere without a book to read.

 

Twitters or Twits?

Martin Weller has been writing a lot about twitter recently, in fact almost to the point of fanaticism! (don’t take this the wrong way Martin). I have been trying to be a good twitterer (?) but I find it difficult to manage to both do stuff and inform others about it. I even find it difficult to twitter at conferences as I get so engrossed in them that I forget to write stuff down! – I think it’s a me thing but I would put some points to Martin in respect of recent Twitter postings

1. The case of those poor students that were involved in the lockdown. I can understand them wanting to keep in touch and it’s great that twitter helped. I obviously haven’t been involved in such things before although I did grow up in Belfast during the “troubles” and we did get regularly awoken on a Saturday night by a bomb blast, sometimes the windows would rattle or the building would shake. Not perhaps as immediately scary as a gunman in the building but still bad at the time. I dealt with it by finding another human and giving them a hug. I think electronic devices only go so far in the comforting area. I also think that before twitter people could still text or indeed phone each other for support (although there may be a point here about alerting a gunman to your presence!) – What happens if the gunman is using twitter to see what they’re up to and where they are?

2. A senior OU colleague (senior in responsibility not years!) yesterday told me how he was at the “Making Connections” conference at the OU. He was at the back taking notes (twittering) and listening to the talks. He went to the talk before Martins and started taking notes, half way through the talk it became so boring that he decided to stop taking notes and ‘twittered’ to say that the speaker was so boring and the talk was so dull that he was giving up (or words to that effect). Low and behold Martin came on as the next speaker and what he did was show a mashup of OU twitter feeds from the conference and to my colleagues embarrassment his twitter post was up in two foot high lettering on the stage for all to see! (be careful what you write)

3. My team are making a site about Bio Diversity (see previous postings) and one thing that’s cropped up as an issue for people involved in similar projects is that when a new plant or animal species is found (particularly rare plants in specific locations) once the details are published people are going to that spot and digging up the plants and taking them back to their gardens. This poses a serious problem as it may be wiping out some rare species and when the plant life goes the animal life sometimes follows too. I’ve heard reports of this type of “theft” happening a lot recently.

So in summary I can see some really good reasons to twitter not least of which is that I know why people haven’t turned up for meetings or what useful tools they’re playing with. The downside is that I’m really quite rubbish at it and I haven’t found the killer reason why I should twitter. I store my tweets up to become blogs. Sometimes I store blogs up to become reports but mostly I store everything up to bore my partner over a drink at the weekend!

Finally Martin I think you need to go to TA (Twitters Anonymous) as I think it’s becoming an addiction!

 

Do u-Switch?

I’m off work ill today (just a cold but it’s a bad ‘un) and not feeling up to much but rather than monging around the house watch daytime T.V. (spare me, it’s government tactic to get us all back in work quicker!). I decided to use today to browse comparisons of suppliers of ‘stuff’.

I never normally have time to do this so I went to u-switch first and I’ve now switched energy suppliers and saved myself £345 per year apparently. I also checked out my car insurance and house insurance but they’re still about the cheapest around. I like the fact that it’s so simple to switch with u-switch. I have used price comparison sites before and the last time was for getting a savings account and the hassle was minimal. I also chose critical illness cover through an online comparison site and I chose the ‘one above the cheapest’ because I could do all the paperwork online (if that makes sense). What does this all mean? – Well not much to the rest of you but to me it’s one pound per day or the price of a nice hot latte. I think I deserve it.

N.B. A colleague and I were discussing how blog posting is selective, i.e. you don’t tend to write blog posts about how you spent Saturday plumbing the downstairs toilet in or going to Tesco’s to do a shop? – Why not? – Because that’s too routine. You may twitter about it or use your Facebook updater to let people know but even these seem to have some exclusivity, you wouldn’t say for example tell people about your toilet actions? – would you?

Blogging Stigma…

I’ve been having a break from blogging to try and access what I’m getting from it and also because I’ve frankly been too lazy to blog! Also Nikki came in whilst I was posting the previous blog post and said “Oh you’re not one of those are you, who on earth would want to read what you have to say!” (or something similar, she might not have been quite that scathing but it was along those lines). I felt that my nerdiness had reached a new low.

 Facebook and Myspace and other social networking sites are treated with more kudos and online fora are also treated as more acceptable, possibly because they are not so blatently egocentric.

Patrick and I discussed this briefly as I suggested that people who blog about other things (here’s a good article, links to useful resources etc.) don’t seem to be seen as so egotistical, Patrick felt the opposite that actually people who do that seem to be more egotistical and self important because they want to be recognised as an authority in some way and have enough sway to push others to their particular set of things. In the end evertything does come down to our own subjective viewpoint. Whether we like it or not we are part of the “I” culture so we might as well join in.

Writing about writing!

Patrick (a colleague who is also a blog novice like myself, visit
http://openpad.wordpress.com/
 to see his blog) asked me for help on how to embed video into blog posts on WordPress. If you scroll down below the bit where you input the text when you’re adding a post you’ll see some other options (tabs) for Video, Slideshows etc. select Video and then cut n paste the link you want to reference into the box and click “Send to Editor”, voila!

Patrick and I were talking about our blog experiences generally since we’re both novices. I feel a little uncomfortable about it because I still feel like it’s a bit pompous of me to expect to write something and expect it to be interesting to others and also that I don’t know whether to write about work or life stuff and how to get the work/life balance right in my postings. Really I feel it’s a bit like having a diary like when you’re a kid but then expecting it to be so mind bogglingly fascinating to others that you must share it online to the world!

Patrick said something about having only so many anecdotes and when those are used up he’s going to run out of things to say, I feel a bit like that myself. My brain is full of stuff which I’ve mentally blogged (if you get my drift) and which I’m going to get down in a blog if I can but after that I’m wondering whether I’ll have anything more to say?

I think I’m getting addicted to blogging

I spent some of last night and today looking at technorati
http://technorati.com
and other sites that kind of rate and validate blog content (I’m sure it does much more than that but that’s what I see it doing). I signed up and got my blog registered to me and I browsed other peoples blogs and am adding them to my favourites. My main problem at the moment is that at work I have three different mechanisms for RSS feeds (Google Desktop, RSS Reader and I’ve just installed Office 2007, there are also the browser widgets and toolbars). I’m getting nearly overwhelmed by information right now since I’ve been adding stuff left, right and centre to my feeds and favourites on various tools and websites.

I’m wondering how other people manage to apply filters to get appropriate stuff out. I can of course choose to ignore postings goings into all these other blogs that I’ve subscribed to but actually most of them are useful in some sense. Is the filtering process a human one bourn from experience of what to look out for? (in which case should I be working on making the first ten words of each post eye catching!) or are there automated methods used by people? – Is this something that should be explored further with web 2.0 to avoid information overload? – Also can rating mechanisms (such as technorati) be used to provide a guide to the authenticity of at least the authority of the information from particular sources?

 As you can see I’m very green in this area but I think that there’s a gap in the market here for something that works with other Web 2.0 tools and provides (a) A filter which is adaptable depending on what I’m doing so if I’m at work I get more work related blog stuff and if I’m at home I get more leisure related stuff etc. (b) A method of enhancing what I need to know by doing something clever with the way I might search or browse for information.

 So to explain (b) I was thinking like with an Encyclopaedia you find out what you want and can then follow it up with more stuff using intelligent behind the scenes aggregation (with an Encyclopaedia I tend to look at the topic and see references to other things that some brainy person has referenced and are actually more what I wanted to know about). For example I looked up paganism because of a programme on the TV and I discovered that actually despite the programme incorrectly calling it a pagan ritual the programme was more about Wicca. I could do that online with a search but a lot of the information is rubbish, shops selling stuff etc., things about witches and rubbish that is not a simple statement of the facts (try it yourself).

By the way I’m not obsessed by paganism or wicca, the programme was Silent Witness I think (BBC) and it was a pretty duff episode which is why I had my nose in a book in the first place.

My blog mentor

I now have a Blog mentor (Martin Weller) – he’s a great chap and I actually know him in real life (yes I do exist outside the blogosphere!), he has offered to give me some help with getting my blog in shape. He has a very interesting blog himself (The Ed Techie) at
http://nogoodreason.typepad.co.uk/

On a quasi related theme I’ve been reading Mark Van Harmelen’s (JISC funded) report on Web 2.0 for content for learning and teaching in higher education
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/programme_digital_repositories/project_web2_and_policy.aspx
.

The main thing that I liked about it was the recommendation not to be so perscriptive or stifle experimentation. This is something I’ve been trying to sell to others here for a while. I’m not the most creative person in the world (check my blogs!) but I can see that Web 2.0 increases possibilities for less formal learning and enhances formal learning mechanisms but only if educators embrace the idea of giving away some control to the learners and learn that not everything needs to be polished and clean in order for it to be useful.

As an example most YouTube videos are far from clean but I’ve used these to teach people about Second Life
http://secondlife.com
as there are some excellent tutorials in there e.g.

Weblog of Will Woods

This is my first attempt at a blog although I’ve used Wiki’s extensively (media wiki being my current wiki of choice) this is the removal of my blogging virginity.