July 2009 Archives

flickr has groups and pools and creates a community of practice. Twitter reinforces personal relationships.

My twitter stream connects me to people I know, and, as I wrote in the previous entry, helps us stay abreast of each other's goings on in meatspace and online, no matter what service or host we are using to publish content.

Flickr, with is proliferation of group discussion, photo pools, cross user tag search is a great resource for someone interested in learning and practicing photography. It is easy to connect to or start a community of practice.

If I post a new picture and send out notification via twitter, that picture gets seen by my twitter crowd. These are almost entirely people I know in the real world or at least have some more general personal connection to, not a connection defined exclusively by a shared interest in photography.

If I post a new picture to flickr and add it a relevant photo pool, I get views from users from across the world, views from people that have some similar taste or interest. If I am lucky I get a comment from one or two of them. This works both ways. I can find photos and discussion that are of interest to me. Right now, all this activity is happening in a centralized service.

Is there a way to get to make these connections and foster this community in a distributed way. I want to start posting my pictures on this site, where I can own and exert control over them. I still want to take part in the community at flickr. I don't want to double post pictures. I guess we can't have it all, right?

I use twitterfeed to tweet out when I publish new content. This content mainly consists of posts to this blog, my psu blog, and flickr photos. I feel (although I am not sure, yet) that the vast majority of views on my content come from my twitter network. This frees me in a way to experiment with different sites and services. As long as I can invite people in via twitter, I don't have to worry as much as dragging my community along with me.

To explain in the metaphor of RSS: once someone follows me on twitter, they are subscribed to all the activity online I wish to share. I don't have to worry about asking people to subscribe to a different feed as I start a new blog or use a new sharing service.

In the title, I describe this as a portable social graph, and I mean that in the limited regard to twitter being a notification service that one can use to share any web content using the hyperlink. Really, it is a notification service to rule them all. Content storage and management can be handled elsewhere on the web. Twitter is what binds it all.

Twitter does not provide a portable social graph in the sense that we can export and access identity and relationship information to use in any manner. Twitter also does not provide a way to use your social graph for any kind of authorization (for example, I cannot restrict a photo on my flickr stream to only those I follow on twitter). Systems based on open content are always easier to implement than systems based on closed content, and for this reason open content systems tend to get implemented first.

All this musing is ignoring one question. Am I misusing twitter by piping my activity through it? Am I stretching the boundaries of the pattern of interaction that one expects on twitter?

After all the discussions on blogs I have engaged in around the Penn State campuses, I come across this, a 90 second blurb that gets to the heart of it with more ease than I have been able to attain. It doesn't matter if anyone reads your blog. The exercise, the meta-cognition, the forcing yourself to join a conversation even if it only minuscule, is what it is important. Do it for yourself. The speakers approach it more from a business perspective, but it can apply to anyone.

Note: This post was originally written on bradkozlek.com, before moving to edushizzle. Obviously, my wrangling led me back to one blog, and my blog at PSU won.

This is a good question. This is at least the sixth blog I have created. The last two and half years I have blogged over at the edushizzle, my blogs@psu powered blog. As manager of blogs@psu, I moved my blogging there in the spirit of eating one's own dogfood. I have been completely happy with that platform over the years, but there are several reasons I am starting a new blog (in addition to my psu blog, not in place of my psu blog):

• Running my own instance of Movable Type gives me a sandbox where I can try out new ideas and install new plugins before deciding if they could or should be installed at blogs@psu.
• After talking for the past two years about the value of personal content management, I am ready to start building a more permanent web presence. I could continue to do this at psu, and really this is a subtle point since I do own and can easily migrate my content from psu to any domain if the need ever emerged. The PSU blog is just a sliver of my life, and as I stuggle with idea of digital identity and presence, I feel the need to plant a flag at a domain of my own.
• With each new blog the audience and my own personal expectations for blogging change. I do think with each iteration I am getting closer to something of value for myself. This blog is no different. Will blogging under my own domain motivate me to write more? How will the character of my writing change? Let's find out.

I am sure my head will start spinning as I try to figure out if I should post items here or at the shizzle. Really, I need another blog like I need a hole in the head. Nevertheless, I am drawn to start this new endeavor. Let the wrangling of digital identity begin.

I am still buzzing from ldsc09. I was unable to make last year's learning design summer camp, so this was my first experience with the event. I am not sure how to begin to talk about it or if it is even worthwhile to attempt to convey the energy and enjoyment the event provided me.

First off, having Dean Blackstock provide live music while people were filtering in and getting registered, and later as people were returning from lunch was a great addition. I really felt like it served to not only energize the crowd but open our minds to participation and engagement. It signaled that this is not the traditional event on campus, and I think it got our attention and put us in the right mood.

Pretty much the whole event was captured on ustream and also youtube, but I have to say that connecting to people before, during, and after the conference in physical space was the highlight of my time. I think the size of the event may have hit a sweet spot in terms of real-time backchannel. The discussion via tweets and live question tool were very manageable to me, and made the event much more rich. It definitely kept me actively engaged during the panels. Even if I wasn't tweeting, just reading what others were saying helped keep me involved.

One thing that came through is that the blogs@psu is becoming more and more of the general purpose platform that I had hoped it would. Examples were discussed of blogs to support portfolio learning, courseware authoring and sharing, geotagging, and community interaction (a la psu voices). The "when is a blog not a blog" notion may be hitting the mainstream here.

Computers in general and the internet in particular are special in that they are designed without any clear function or use case. The people using them get to define that. It is a constantly evolving. Events like this are so important. We need engaged faculty and others interested in learning to continue to hash out how these tools can and more importantly should be used. If this group isn't doing, then who will?

Thanks to everyone who made this event so awesome. Now I need to go back to trying to make blogs@psu rock harder for everyone who was in that room.

Christine, originally uploaded by Brad.K.

Demoing post to blog.